Innovative Projects Realized

NLP sentiment analysis for contact and support centers

In today’s competitive market, customer service has become essential to any company willing to expand and increase its business. Companies cannot afford to fall short of consumer expectations. With the recent progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impressive results in different industrial areas, companies are adopting AI techniques for customer service. Most of the applications of AI in contact centers are based on the use of chatbots. These conversational agents are trained to interact with the customer and answer questions. These AI solutions does not provide ways to measure customer satisfaction. This part is still handled manually through customer satisfaction surveys sent by emails, phone or online. However, on average, only third of the surveys get responses. AI can play an interesting role in measuring customer satisfaction by directly analyzing the customer-agent interaction. TO BE CONT’D

3D Cerebral Ultrasound Elastography Incorporating Spatial and Temporal Priors

The objective of our project is to assess the physiological condition of brain tissue by mapping it’s elasticity in 3D using ultrasound. We will have both technical and clinical contributions in this project. Technically, we will develop a 3D ultrasound elastography method incorporating more than two volumes of ultrasound Radio-Frequency (RF) frames collected while tissue is undergoing deformation. A non-linear cost function consisting of data terms, spatial (axial, lateral and elevational) continuity terms and temporal regularization terms will be globally optimized to obtain frame to frame 3D displacement fields. Our clinical contribution will involve applying the aforesaid algorithm to ultrasound 3D RF data acquired during a brain surgery. Since any sort of abnormality causes a shift in the stiffness of the local tissue, the frame to frame displacement map will distinguish pathological tissue from the normal one. Having no regularized optimization based elastography been applied to characterize brain tissue in 3D thus far, our method will open a new window for helping clinicians in anomaly detection and image guided brain surgery.

Architecture d’unification de mitadonneees dans un moteur de recherche semantique

Elaboration d’un modele de classification permettant d’unifier au sein d’un ensemble taxonomique unique des

etiquettes de classes issues de corpus separes. Appliquer Ie nouvel ensemble taxonomique sur l’ensemble des

corpus pour finalement obtenir un ensemble unique de documents et d’etiquettes. Le prototype mis au point sera

utilise par Ie partenaire dans Ie cadre de son offre produit de type moteur de recherche.

Participants

MITACS –

The Centralization of Social Need: what has been the impact on the affected populations of the centralization of social services into Windsor’s downtown core?

This study will explore how the centralization of social services and those who use them impact the environment of Downtown Windsor. The goal of the project is to understand how the location of social services effects the movement of people who are using these services. Stakeholders, businesses, and residents will be surveyed in order to understand the perceived impact on these groups. The project will also use mapping in order to analyse the physical locations of the services, service users and other environmental factors which may have an impact on this movement. The Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association will use the data in order to further advocate for businesses and stakeholders.

A Conceptual Aerodynamic Design for a High-Lift Electric Hybrid Airship

Hybrid airships with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability have the potential to drastically simply the commercial transportation system by picking up payload from the pick-up points and delivering it directly to the pre-set destinations. Development of new electric hybrid airship designs for the Canadian and global transport industry will lead to lower shipping costs, where the ultimate goal is to cut shipping cost by at least 50 percent per kg of payload and by at least 10 percent of the present-day cost of ground and marine transportation per kg of cargo. This study proposes a new conceptual aerodynamic design for a hybrid airship capable of lifting at least 25-ton cargo up to a distance of at least 1000 km on a single battery charge while cruising at a speed of at least 100 knots (185 km/hr).

Design Development for Prefabricated Building Components using Nano/microfibrillated cellulose (NMFC) produced from Industrial Hemp and Old Corrugated Cardboard (OCC)

The intern will work with a multi-disciplinary research team from architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, business development and materials research in the design development phase of a project to create a structural insulated panel prototype from cellulose. As the most abundant organic polymer on the planet, cellulose is currently emerging as a sustainable material alternative to plastics and other non-recyclable materials. Using sustainable feedstocks (industrial hemp and old corrugated cardboard) and water, this research project uses a matrix of nano/micro fibrillated cellulose to create components for a prefabricated building system: flat stock and aerogels combined as a structural insulated panel (SIP). SIPS are currently used in the construction industry using combinations of spray foams, toxic adhesives and non-recyclable materials. TO BE CONT’D

Functional MRI investigation of the neural processes underlying pain modulation in human participants

Cannabis has been known to treat ailments for thousands of years, including conditions such as pain, cancer, arthritis, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis (MS) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Despite an increase in research dedicated to molecular and behavioural effects of cannabinoids, there has been no direct evidence to elucidate the effect of cannabis on pain-related areas in the human central nervous system. Using functional MRI we will identify how neural processes involved in pain are altered by cannabis in the brain, brainstem and spinal cord in healthy participants, and also how these processes are altered by fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a prevalent chronic pain disorder. This project will be an essential first step toward future research into cannabis-based treatment of acute and chronic pain for a variety of conditions including FMS.

Assessment of the mechanical properties on PVD coatings using scratch and indentation tests.

In manufacturing industry many tools are protected by coatings to increase tool life and productivity. It is only logical that mechanical properties of the coating will affect its performance. Therefore, it is essential to characterise the coating and understand its properties to tailor it for a specific application. These properties might be assessed with different characterisation methods such as scratch test and indentation. The objective of this study is to provide coating characterization for the partner organization and develop a standard procedure to assess coating properties. This will help the partner organization to optimise and develop coatings and keep track of quality.

An investigation into the operation and operational benefits of a new converter technology for supercapacitor charging

Batteries are main storage systems in many applications such as electric vehicles, shipping, transportation, and utility backup power. With the recent breakthrough in the supercapacitor technology, it is predicted that supercapacitors will challenge the batteries in many of these applications since their power delivery is much faster than the batteries. The current chargers are designed based on the requirements of the batteries. Considering supercapacitors as the prospective next generation energy storage systems, it is claimed that the deflection conversion technology offers much faster and significantly more efficient charging scheme compared to the current chargers. As an important consequence of this development, with the adoption of the new generation of supercapacitors in electric vehicles, drivers can charge the vehicles’ batteries on the go leading to saving time, reduced costs and benefitting the environment. This research proposal is intended to validate the superior characteristics of the chargers using the deflection conversion technology.

Tunable Fiber Laser Source based on Supercontinuum Generation

The objective of the project is to conceive and build a prototype of a tunable “white fiber

laser” i.e. a broadband light source. As it is based on supercontinuum generation in a

microstructured fiber, the source is expected to be compact and find applications in several

domains, from fundamental studies to biomedical imaging and spectroscopy as well as

sensing. Current supercontinuum-based tunable sources use a straightforward design where

a tunable filter is used to select a narrow band of wavelengths from the broadband source,

discarding most of the light, thus being very inefficient. The project consists in conceiving and

building a more efficient tunable laser source. The idea is to extract a narrow band of

wavelength from the supercontinuum, and recycle the remaining supercontinuum in the same

fiber in a cavity. As a majority of the light will be recycled rather than discarded, the process

is expected to be more efficient than the current scheme.

Deep-learning-based Fine-grained Furniture Classification and Winning Strategy Recommendation

The project aims to develop a novel deep learning based computer vision system to identify different categories and sub-categories of the furniture and the associated attributes (such as color, shape, style, and material). It will also develop an automated recommendation system that can learn from the massive historical data and the on-going stream of data to adaptively adjust the parameter combination for each product to maximize the chance of winning the competition against other companies. The competitive advantage gained by the new technologies developed through this project will help the partner organization, Cymax, to further grow and expand its business.

MalChain: Run-time detection of malicious virtualized components in Service Function Chains using machine learning

Intern will develop new methodologies based on system level logs to detect malicious activities in virtualized environments. To achieve this goal, intern must review the state-of-the-art and proposes new solutions to overcome the shortcomings of currently existing methodologies and introduce new functionalities. The proposed solutions need to be validated and published based on experimental results. The Research Department at the Ericsson Montreal location conducts research and development in cybersecurity, software defined networks and network function virtualization. The interns will work with a team of researchers towards accomplishing the aforementioned tasks through his/her expertise in platform security, machine learning, and cloud environment. TO BE CONT’D