Innovative Projects Realized

Évaluation de l’éco-efficacité par simulation de procédés dans le domaine de la transformation laitière.

Un prototype de logiciel d’évaluation de l’éco-efficacité des procédés de transformations des produits laitiers par simulation numérique de procédés industriels a été développé dans le cadre des travaux de doctorat de S. Benoit. Le présent projet vise à rendre cet outil utilisable par l’industrie laitière et à l’enrichir de fonctionnalités supplémentaires. En plus de quelques tâches d’améliorations des algorithmes, plusieurs fonctionnalités élargissant les capacités du logiciel seront ajoutées pour le rendre plus performant, la bibliothèque de procédés unitaires sera enrichie afin d’autoriser la modélisation de procédés plus variés, et la simulation des unités de filtrations par membranes fera l’objet d’une modélisation plus avancée dans le but d’améliorer le réalisme des résultats de simulation.
Sur la base du prototype développé, l’outil permettra d’évaluer parallèlement les dimensions environnementales et économiques des procédés laitiers modélisés afin d’en déterminer l’éco-efficacité et d’identifier les opportunités d’améliorations. TO BE CONT’D

Smart TECHnology for better shared decision making about prenatal testing for pregnant WomEn (TECH4WE)

Whether or not to undergo prenatal screening to assess the risk of certain genetic conditions in the fetus, and if so deciding among available prenatal screening tests, is a difficult decision faced by all pregnant women and their partners. However, few are aware of the implications of the various options. With shared decision making (SDM), patients and doctors share health decisions based on the pros and cons of all the options and on what matters most to the patient, so decisions reflect this knowledge and the preferences of those involved. SDM reduces decision regret and reduces overuse of diagnostic testing. A mobile app could be a cost-effective, and efficient way to help patients make decisions. My research (Rahimi.2017,PMID:28838306) found little evidence of the use of mobile apps to support SDM, and none that support prenatal testing decisions. TO BE CONT’D

Electrification planning with limited information – A case study on Ethiopia

Globally, 1.2 billion people lack access to electricity, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Countries across these regions rely on techno-economic models for electrification planning, which help them take relevant decisions under financial constraints and resource limitations. Optimization models are one of the most commonly used models in the domain of energy access. However, they are based on assumptions of perfect foresight with respect to future information i.e. perfect competition, market equilibriums, future costs, population and GDP projections. In reality there are a lot of uncertainties with respect to the information available and the foresight is far from perfect. The uncertainties are even higher in the context of electricity access today, given the multitude of technology options available – centralized grid, mini-grids, or standalone systems. With Ethiopia as a case study, this project applies a limited foresight approach with a shorter decision horizon, to a spatial electrification model called OnSSET . By doing so, we can understand the spatial progression of energy development with sequential decision making.

Investigation of erosion/corrosion resistance/mechanisms and heat treatment effects on themechanical and tribolo gical properties of superalloys and their coatings

Superalloys are a group of high-perfornlance alloys which are widely used for high stress, high

temperature, and severe wear and erosion/corrosion environments. Erosion and corrosion

constitute one of the most challenging problems limiting the service lifetime of superalloys.

However, due to the complexity of testing procedures and multiplicity of affecting factors as

well as the long test duration, the studies of erosion and corrosion resistance/mechanisms for

superaUoys are very limited, which significantly limit the application and improvement of these

alloys. To tlus end, the proposed research is aimed at investigating the erosion and corrosion

resistance and understanding the damage mechanisms of superalloys and their coatings in

erosion and corrosion environments. Heat treatments may modify the microstructures and thus

the properties of superalloys, as they do for carbon steels. To confirm this, the response of the

superalloy performance to heat treatments will also be investigated. The research results will

guide the application of existing superalloys and will help with the design of….

Splicing alterations: from pathogenic variant discovery to next generation therapeutics development

Many human genetic diseases are associated with defects in post-transcriptional gene regulation and alternative splicing. Despite rapid technological advancements, successful diagnostic rates for rare genetic disorders are still low and clinical interventions and treatments unavailable for most patients. This project aims to address this challenge by developing novel antisense RNA therapies based on the splice-switching oligonucleotide (SSO) technology. SSOs allow correcting aberrant transcript splicing by targeting disease mutations at the transcript level. This project comprises three aims. First, discovery of candidate target genes for SSOs will involve transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) of patient samples and identification of potentially pathogenic genetic variants using public databases. Second, a set of SSOs for top-ranking candidates will be designed and tested experimentally in vivo in human HepG2 cell line. TO BE CONT’D

Non contact monitoring of glucose level in blood using mmWave systems

Glucose monitoring has improved significantly over the last few years. Devices have become smaller, and today wireless wearable devices offer a seamless solution for people who require to monitor their glucose level multiple times daily. However, wearable devices are not always well accepted by people. Furthermore, monitoring solutions that are completely autonomous face acceptability issues and are not always very convenient to wear. Consequently, there is still a need for monitoring devices that are not wearable and yet very easy and comfortable to use.
In this context, Karly Smith, an undergraduate student in biomedical engineering at the university of Waterloo will work on a project to tackle the specific issue of non-contact glucose-level monitoring. So far, devices require access to people’s blood to perform this measurement. For people suffering from diabetes, this is an issue since the glucose level needs to be monitored several times a day. New solutions came up but they still necessitate wearing a patch that embeds a probe beneath the skin. […]

A melanoma diagnosis and prognosis framework with human readable explanation

Melanoma is the most lethal skin cancer, accounting for 2% of all skin cancer types, yet approximately 75% of skin cancer deaths. It often evolves from clear skin or existing moles, making it difficult to diagnose at early stage. Besides, the treatment of melanoma is a complex decision making process, which is affected by a large number of internal and external factors, e.g. disease location, staging, etc. Our objective is to utilize the medical data collected by CMRN to design an electronic tool to save valuable time of clinicians in routine pathology assessment and ultimately assist evidence based decision making. The system will help to identify high risk pathological observations. It combines state-of-the-art pattern recognition algorithms with natural language processing (NLP), which generates human readable explanation. Moreover, our system can generate easy-understandable analysis results to patients, which enables patients to better understand their own conditions. TO BE CONT’D

Advanced Hybrid Solid-State Lithium(-ion) Batteries for Electric Vehicle Applications – Year two

As the dominating power supplies for current electric vehicles (EVs), the state-of-the-art LIBs are yet sulfuring from severe challenges in terms of safety, lifespan, and energy density due to the adoption of liquid electrolytes (LEs). Accordingly, developing next generation solid-state lithium(-ion) batteries (SSLBs) is considered to be a feasible approach to achieve safe and high energy density power supplies for future EVs with long driving distance and short charging time. This project will aim at developing innovative hybrid solid-state Li(-ion)batteries (HSSLBs) based on hybrid/composite solid-state electrolytes (SSEs). To realize high performance HSSLBs, many scientific and technological interface challenges are urgently required to be addressed. TO BE CONT’D

Advanced Hybrid Solid-State Lithium(-ion) Batteries for Electric Vehicle Applications

As the dominating power supplies for current electric vehicles (EVs), the state-of-the-art LIBs are yet sulfuring from severe challenges in terms of safety, lifespan, and energy density due to the adoption of liquid electrolytes (LEs). Accordingly, developing next generation solid-state lithium(-ion) batteries (SSLBs) is considered to be a feasible approach to achieve safe and high energy density power supplies for future EVs with long driving distance and short charging time. This project will aim at developing innovative hybrid solid-state Li(-ion)batteries (HSSLBs) based on hybrid/composite solid-state electrolytes (SSEs). To realize high performance HSSLBs, many scientific and technological interface challenges are urgently required to be addressed. TO BE CONT’D

Assessment and Genetics of Stress Resilience in Dairy Cattle – Year two

Dairy cattle are exposed to stressors that negatively impact health, fertility, welfare and production. Health and climate experts predict that exposure to stressors (i.e. pathogens and extreme temperature events) will increase as climate conditions continue to destabilize. Due to increased antimicrobial resistance, there is urgent need to explore alternative strategies to promote animal health; it is anticipated that genetic selection for increased stress resilience will yield healthier animals that will live longer and be more productive. Given the importance of the innate immune system for directing and participating in the immune response against pathogens, the proposed study will utilize an immune stressor (microbial-associated molecular pattern; MAMP) to stress phenotype dairy cattle. TO BE CONT’D

Assessment and Genetics of Stress Resilience in Dairy Cattle

Dairy cattle are exposed to stressors that negatively impact health, fertility, welfare and production. Health and climate experts predict that exposure to stressors (i.e. pathogens and extreme temperature events) will increase as climate conditions continue to destabilize. Due to increased antimicrobial resistance, there is urgent need to explore alternative strategies to promote animal health; it is anticipated that genetic selection for increased stress resilience will yield healthier animals that will live longer and be more productive. Given the importance of the innate immune system for directing and participating in the immune response against pathogens, the proposed study will utilize an immune stressor (microbial-associated molecular pattern; MAMP) to stress phenotype dairy cattle. TO BE CONT’D

Securing Enterprises with Social Network Analysis

Computer administrators defend enterprises using tools that do not scale to the size of modem

networks. As a result, malicious behavior in enterprise networks generally is W1detected, even when

attackers do not attempt to be stealthy. One way to improve this situation may be through the

application of social network analysis to the computer sectrrity problems of the enterprise. In this

project we propose to apply social networking research to two security problems: the control of

proprietary information and the analysis of log files. In the first project, we will study how to protect

proprietary information by limiting it to “communities of collaboration.” In the second, we will

examine whether interaetions between users, computers, applications, as recorded in log files, can be

modeled as social interactions where W1usual interactions correlate with security violations. This work

provide insights that will help improve CA’s data leak prevention and log analysis products.