Innovative Projects Realized

Wild Blueberry/European blueberry Molecular Responses to Floral Diseases

The wild blueberry is an important crop in the Canadian Atlantic provinces with 140 million kg of fruit being produced in 2016 with a farm gate value of $155 million. However, gray mold disease caused by Botrytis cinerea can cause substantial damage with 20% crop losses being reported. This study seeks to the genes and natural compounds including phenolic compounds produced in wild and European blueberry plants that provide resistance to this fungal organism. Outcomes from this study will include the generation of critical, basic knowledge on mechanisms conferring disease resistance in blueberries, and new technologies that will negate the need for blanket applications of disease control products to blueberry fields. When completed, this research is anticipated to benefit over 2000 producers by improving berry yields, production sustainability and global competitiveness. This study will also provide the student with an opportunity to gain new knowledge and skills that is presently not available elsewhere in Canada.

Natural Language Interface for Ad Hoc Queries in Analytics

The main aim of this project is to design a database that provides a simplified way for individuals without the technical background to query information from the database. Such a database will operate on natural language, where the user asks the database a question about information retrieval and it presents the user with suitable answers. A database of this format aids users who are unfamiliar with scripting and database management languages, such as SQL, to use it seamlessly without the need for any prior training.

Intelligent Perception of Mining Equipment Operation using a Single Camera

In order to further enhance the productivity of mines, it is crucial to optimize mining operations. Motion Metrics Int. Corp. offers a wide range of machine vision based products to monitor mining excavators, and to generate actionable information for the mine management board. Performance of the current Motion Metrics’ products can be improved by intelligent perception of equipment operation state from the videos captured by a single camera. Perception of the operation enables the existing solutions to understand equipment activity from video stream and take a proper action in real-time. Video streams can be annotated based on the activity of the target equipment, e.g. an excavator digging cycle, and can be redirected to different proprietary processes, such as algorithms to measure teeth length, analyze content of the loaded bucket etc. TO BE CONT’D

Assessing Volatile Organic Compounds as a Measure of Crop Health

Plants produce a blend of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) quickly in response to various growing conditions and plant stressors. These compounds are released well before there are any obvious signs of stress, such as wilting or loss of chlorophyll. Blueberry and other crops with thicker leaves, are slow to show obvious signs of stress and therefore are more prone to reduced crop quality and quantity than other field crops. As a first step to developing an unmanned crop monitoring device, we will be measuring VOCs produced during crop stress and measuring changes in these VOCs during the growing season, as the stress levels increase.

Northern Centre for Sustainability: research and advocacy for changes in municipal regulations and building code for the construction of a carbon-negative, energy-positive, waste-positive and closed water loop building above the 60th parallel

Ecology North wants to hire architecture, engineering and urban interns to assists in the research, outreach, awareness and education of the world’s most advanced sustainable building practices, towards the creation of a building that makes the best use of regenerative architecture, to heal the planet and the people. The project is for the construction of the Northern Centre for Sustainability. The building will be a place for not-for-profit organizations whose work is related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to centralize their operations, synergize on capacity and be better equipped to share knowledge and monitor and encourage best practices in terms of sustainability in the built environment.

Pilot and Full-Scale Filtration Investigations of Pathogen and Index Organism Removal During Drinking Water Treatment: Enabling Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment for Utility Management

The City of Ottawa is proactive in its drinking water treatment practices and has worked with Health Canada in developing frameworks for integration of quantitative microbial risk assessments (QMRA) into drinking water treatment decision-making. While considerable data necessary for applying QMRA in Ottawa are available regarding protozoan pathogens and treatment indicators during various periods of filter operation, significantly less information regarding bacterial and viral pathogens is available. In response to this need, pilot- and full-scale filtration experiments will be conducted using a suite of pathogen (i.e. disease causing bacteria, virus, and protozoan) indicators to evaluate and optimize filter performance. The resulting data will contribute to QMRA approaches to assess the importance of this barrier relative to other key pathogen treatment process; most notably, disinfection. This work will contribute critical operational information to better the management of public health risk from disease causing organisms.

Evaluating Clustering Techniques using a range of Semantic Similarity Evaluation Metrics

This research project will allow us to assess how similar two news articles are to each other. This may be easy for a human to do, but for machines this is actually quite hard. OpenReg will make use of this assessment to determine if a news article is important for their users. The goal is to be able to identify to what degree 2 articles need to be similar to each other for the user to be interested, yet different enough for them to not read duplicate information.

Sing pray heal: Exploring the Health Benefits of Modern Kirtan as Sacred Community Music Therapy

This research project is an exploration of the salient health benefits of participating in chant-based music experiences, ultimately to determine whether or not such music making can have perceived therapeutic impact. Merging the fields of music therapy and medical ethnomusicology, I will examine kirtan chanting as ‘sacred community music therapy’ and utilize a five-dimensions model of health, grouping perceived benefit into physical, emotional, mental, social and/or spiritual domains.

Kirtan is a call-and-response style of prayerful singing that originated in East India and now presents in modern forms led by non-Indians, yogis and musicians. Shanti Mission, a group based in Cooranbong, Australia, uses modern kirtan as a primary component of their healing work. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I will engage in participant observation of Shanti Mission events, performances, workshops and classes and will conduct interviews with both musicians and participants. For comparison and contrast, I will also observe more ‘traditional’ kirtan in contexts such Hindu and Sikh temples in Edmonton. “TO BE CONT’D”

Calcul de la rigidité superfluide dans le régime de coexistence de phase dans les cuprates à température finie

Qu’est-ce que la supraconductivité non-conventionnelle? C’est un phénomène quantique se produisant à haute température dans certains matériaux et associé à la disparition de toute résistance électrique et par l’expulsion des champs magnétiques, une fois ces derniers refroidis sous une température critique Tc et en présence d’un champ magnétique inférieur à un champ magnétique critique Hc. Fondamentalement, la supraconductivité est caractérisée par la formation de paires de Cooper (paires d’électrons), en raison d’une force d’attraction effective entre les électrons. Je m’intéresse aux supraconducteurs à base d’oxyde de cuivre (souvent simplement appelés cuprates), découverts à partir de 1986, dont les Tc sont de plusieurs dizaines de degrés (le record étant de 150K). Dans cette classe de matériaux, de façon complètement contre-intuitive, ce serait les très fortes interactions coulombiennes (répulsives) entre les électrons qui seraient à l’origine de la supraconductivité. TO BE CONT’D

Kappa architecture serving layer suitability

Global service providers in highly regulated financial sectors must accommodate an ever-changing, sometimes competing, landscape of regulatory and business concerns. This project seeks to define a technology infrastructure design that supports current and anticipated data privacy and data residency concerns, making it possible to keep data within borders while still facilitating collaboration across those borders. Consumers are increasingly aware of the collection of their private data, but are often unaware of cross-border movement of their data. Businesses are cognizant of the limited (or untested) reach of legal and regulatory recourse when their data (and their customers’ data) unnecessarily crosses borders. This project seeks to add technology frameworks to aid in addressing those customer and business concerns.

De la vulgarisation scientifique à l’expertise des organisations à but non lucratif : les défis et enjeux du communicateur professionnel dans la production de contenu sensible grand public.

La vulgarisation scientifique suppose de préparer du contenu dit « expert » en vue d’être diffuser et lu par des publics non experts. Ce passage vers un contenu profane demande de comprendre l’information d’origine, mais également des différents publics auxquels il s’adressera : il faut alors communiquer un message pertinent pour ce public au regard de l’expérience du monde de ce destinataire; de ses jugements culturels et sociaux et du sentiment qu’il éprouve face au message et à son destinateur. Cette tâche est parfois réalisée par un journaliste, mais souvent par un professionnel de la communication qui œuvre dans une organisation. Aussi, en collaboration avec la Fondation Jasmin Roy, ce projet vise à comprendre les enjeux de la vulgarisation scientifique dans la production de contenu sensible, ici l’intimidation, la violence et la discrimination faites aux enfants en milieu scolaire au primaire et au secondaire. Ces enjeux peuvent être d’ordre organisationnel, techniques, technologiques ou rédactionnels.

Classification of radiological observation through image-sentence association

Imagia is an AI-driven personalized healthcare company, enabling collaborative development of predictive biomarkers. Its Evidens platform unites deep learning expertise and clinical insights on federated patient data from partnered hospitals & AI research institutions. Imagia delivers impactful solutions to healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers. Imagia’s mission is to leverage advances in artificial intelligence to accelerate accessible personalized medicine with an initial focus on personalized oncology.
This project aims at developing a software prototype which can automatically, or semi-automatically, associate available annotations to their context in radiological reports.