Innovative Projects Realized

How We Build Housing: Exploring Baugruppen in Berlin as Scalable, Participatory Co-production in Berlin

This research project will explore the German Baugruppe model of housing development—literally ‘building group’—through which multiple households organize themselves into an association and pool resources to purchase land and engage an architect to design a multi-unit complex of dwellings to suit their needs. This model removes the land developer from the equation, thus giving households, architects, planners, and policymakers primary roles in housing delivery. The central aim of this research project is to explore case studies of the Baugruppe model within the conceptual framework of participatory housing delivery in order to identify the viability and limitations of this model for Canada, as well as to develop an understanding of the elements, factors, and drivers that have contributed to the model’s success in Germany.

Bird Density and Species Richness in Interior British Columbia – tools to inform conservation value and risk assessment in forestry

Forest companies would like to reduce the number of birds, eggs, and nests that are negatively affected by logging. They are particularly interested in reducing impacts on species at risk. The problem is that we don’t have detailed knowledge of where every bird lives, so it’s difficult to make educated choices about where and how much forest to harvest. This research will help provide a solution to this problem. We can relate bird data to landscape and forest characteristics like elevation, forest age, and forest height to understand which forest types have the most birds. Then we can map where birds are most likely to live, identifying areas with more species and more birds. This information will be provided to the partner organizations and other forest companies to ultimately help develop logging plans that reduce accidental destruction of bird nests and eggs.

A portable multi-sensor navigation system for indoor and urban localization and orientation

This Mitacs cluster project will involve the research, development and deployment of a multi-sensor navigation system that will be used for portable applications, such as dismounted soldier navigation, urban surveying and mobile phone localization. Multi-sensors are needed to provide positioning and orientation information when wireless signals are blocked or inaccurate. The project will focus on methods of relative orientation estimation between the person’s body and the mobile electronic device so that specific aiding and constraints can be applied to make the navigation solution more accurate when navigating with motion sensors for prolonged periods of time without wireless updates. Existing prototypes from Trusted Positioning will be used to expedite the development and deployment. These prototypes have MEMS accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, barometers and wireless positioning systems such as GPS and WiFi. All of these sensors and wireless signals will be targeted for use in the proposed methods.

Assessing the Impact of Customer Service Strategies on Loyalty

This project evaluates the impact of customer service on customer retention and churn. In the first phase, we build a statistical model to examine drivers of customer loyalty. In the second phase, we work with customer service to evaluate the effectiveness of new customer service strategies. This project will enable the company to better predict customer retention and churn by using appropriate metrics. In addition, the company can understand the impact of alternative customer service strategies on customer loyalty and can choose the most effective one for implementation.

One Child at a Time One Family at a Time

Early-years educational programing is linked with greater educational, career and life outcomes. The One Child at a Time One Family at a Time program seeks to assist families in overcoming barriers and giving all children equal access to early-years learning. The home visiting program connects children and their families with individualised support and guidance tailored to a families unique needs and home situation and relevant to their culture and background. In addition to home-based preschool programing support, families receive physical tools such as books, toys and games for their young children. It is believed that the improved social connections and access to resources will ultimately improve numeracy and literacy for pre-school programming putting them on a path for future success.

AI based Pointing and Tracking for Satcom Terminals

Aimed at maximizing the antenna signal of the satellite communication (Satcom) terminal in a satellite system, positioning and tracking methods based on AI are studied in this project. This proposal focuses on the issue of a satellite’s pointing and tracking for a stationary Satcom terminal. The detailed methods includes the following four functional components: 1) data filtering and preprocessing of original sensory data collected by Satcom terminal; 2) data error corrections based on multimodal data fusion; 3) direction search to obtain maximum signal strength based on historical data-based learning, and self-learning; and 4) reinforcement learning based optimization of antenna vector to obtain maximum signal strength. The goal is to realize the high accuracy of satellite pointing and optimize the relocation of the Satcom terminal’s antenna for satellite tracking. The target of the proposed AI-enabled self-aligned algorithm is to enable Satcom terminal to achieve industry leading low acquisition time.

Extended Technology Assessment of Advanced In-situ Recovery Methods for Oil Sands

In-situ recovery methods for oils sands are applied to reservoirs containing bitumen that are too deep for mining. To date there has been only one commercially viable in-situ recovery method, Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD), involving high pressure steam injection and bitumen production using horizontal well pairs located near the base of oil sands formations. While SAGD has enabled conversion of significant resources to reserves (about 170 billion barrels), SAGD has many economic and environmental limitations. SAGD capital and operating costs are high making many projects uneconomic at current low oil prices. Water usage and carbon emissions are also high in SAGD making the process environmentally unsustainable. The Accelerate Cluster projects are aimed at finding new recovery methods that reduce costs of delivering energy to the formations and that also reduce water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. TO BE CONT’D

Deep Sensor Fusion of Appearance, Depth and Thermal Camera Features for Autonomous Driving

The purpose of the proposed research is to explore a deep sensor fusion framework for autonomous driving using a thermal camera and stereo camera. This is a useful driver assistance application for challenging environments such as night-time and rainy or snowy weather. Single sensor, such as monocular, stereo and thermal camera-based autonomous driving applications are not robust enough for practical applications. The monocular camera which provides descriptive appearance information is affected by illumination variation. This can be addressed by utilizing stereo-based depth information. However, the stereo depth is less reliable at nighttime. This issue can be addressed by using the thermal camera. It can be seen that features obtained from the thermal camera and stereo camera are complementary, resulting in the increase of robustness of autonomous driving applications. In our previous research we effectively fused stereo-based depth information and monocular camera-based appearance information using the novel ChiNet. TO BE CONT’D

Data Security and Privacy Assurance at LABVI

IoT devices gather a huge amount of information and, consequently, bring many privacy threats. For example, the huge amount of information collected with IoT devices could be used in individual and behavioral patterns profiling. Thus, new safeguards for privacy and data integrity must be specified.
This project aims to resolve data privacy issues using a proposed data privacy assurance with a blockchain model. The objectives of this project are as follows:
1. Assessment of the state of the art of data protection standards, security protocols, privacy policies and regulations and ethical charters.
2. Assessment of privacy challenges and standards in IoT context.
3. Identification of critical factors required for the specification and implementation of a privacy assurance in the context of LabVI
4. Validation of a new data privacy assurance blockchain model.

Biogas production from bioplastic

Plastic litter currently accumulates in oceans, causing a ‘plastic soup’. Therefore, the past years many biodegradable plastics were developed and marketed. Most biodegradable plastics after their use end up in organic recycling, where materials are turned into compost and renewable energy (biogas and heat). However, many biodegradable plastics that are claimed to be ‘biodegradable’ are actually not biodegradable under commercial waste processing conditions. Under lab-scale conditions bioplastics poorly degrade. The biodegradable potential of bioplastics is therefore currently not used.
At least two types of biodegradable plastics (rigid versus foil) of commercial bioplastic producers will be anaerobically digested using the gas displacement method. Both biodegradability and biogas production will be analysed. To possibly speed up the anaerobic digestion process, the effect of pretreating the biodegradable plastics (e.g. particle size reduction) on biodegradability will be investigated.

Management System Standards, Management Systems Software, andOrganizational Learnin g & Performance: Making the Connections

The aim of the project is to investigate how organizational learning and periormance can be

enhanced, diminished, or not affected at all th rough use of environmental and other

management systems standards and related software. The survey research method

(questionnaires) will be used for data collection followed by statistical analysis of the data in

order to determine if a relationship exists or not between the dependent and independent

variables. A report describing and analyzing the findings of the research wi ll be prepared. The

project will assist Intelex Technologies in determining the effectiveness of their products as a

resource for the implementation and management of management systems and in enhancing

periormance.

A Comparative Analysis of Outdoor Education in the Chinese and Canadian Context

This project will examine the prevalence and context of Outdoor Education in China, and compare it to the established field of outdoor education in Canada. In addition, this research will examine the attitudes informing the interaction of Chinese schools with nature, and their natural environment and determining the cross-curricular and cross-cultural connections. Finally, these findings will be used to develop applications for educators in both countries. The scope of my examination of outdoor education is broad, including but not limited to physical education in an outdoor environment, field trips, and science lessons connected to the natural environment, among others. Through these findings, which will then be compared to Canada’s outdoor curriculum, direct applications of this research for Canadian educators likely to work with students from China and otherwise abroad will be drawn.