Innovative Projects Realized

Chromatic and List-Chromatic Numbers of Infinite Hypergrahs

Suppose there are a number of committees of people, which we represent by vertices of a graph and draw an edge between two vertices if those committees share a common member. Then the list-colouring number is (informally) the minimum number k so that as long as each committee comes up with a list of k-many timeslots during which they can meet, we are guaranteed to be able to schedule all of the meetings without conflict. More formall, we say the list-chromatic number of a graph is the least cardinal ? such that for every assignment of lists of colours to vertices v of the graph such that |L(v)| <= ? there is a proper colouring that assigns to every vertex v a colour in L(v). TO BE CONT'D

Demonstration Fusarium Removal Machine Engineering

Fusarium Head Blight is a very common fungus disease prominent in small grain cereal throughout the world. This

fungus infected wheat crop across Canada from Ontario to Alberta. The economic losses in Canada are estimated

at $80 million annually over the last decade due to yield loss and quality loss. Fusarium has been detected for the

first time in northern British Columbia. In the foreseeable future, Fusarium is expected to increase in both

incidence and geographic distribution in Canada. The overall goal of this project is to design and build a pilot

scale demonstration machine for the separation of Fusarium damaged kernels. The demonstration machine shall

be based on the specification document appended plus the improvements and enhancements developed under

this plan. The intended throughput for the demonstration unit is 6 tonnes of wheat per hour. The major

deliverables are the machine itself, the dies and jigs required to produce components and the engineering…

Elder poverty in South Korea

With a fond interest in international development and social economics, the student will undertake an international collaboration to tackle the trending issue of elderly poverty in South Korea. Indeed, South Korea has known a prominent growth since the war but at the expense of the marginalized group of elderly. South Korea now has the greatest relative rate of poverty of elderly among the OECD countries. Thus, this project will attempt to understand how fast economic growth and possibly other exogenous economic factors impact unproductive groups such as the elderly. This will be done with the support of Sang-Ho Nam, PhD. An expert in CGE modeling and income distribution who teaches at Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology and works at Korea Institute for Health & Social Affairs. TO BE CONT’D

Development of standoff explosive detection technique based on infrared sensitive hydrogel microscale physical sensors

Various hydrogel microstructures will be fabricated with hydrogels exhibiting different molecular weights and structures along with varying concentrations of the photoinitiator and ultraviolet doses. Then, resonance sensitivity of fabricated hydrogel microstructures will be investigated with direct electrical and indirect IR heating. Using the dynamic mask, various hydrogel microstructures with different sizes and shapes will be fabricated and their sensitivities will be investigated. Once an optimum design is found, the design will be efficiently mass-produced by using a silicone elastomeric mold. Periodic patterns will be introduced on top of the chosen optimum design and resonance sensitivities will be investigated to find out the most efficient pattern shape and pitch. Using the hydrogel microscale physical sensor system which is mechanically and optically optimized, standoff photothermal resonance spectroscopy for various explosives will be performed at different distances in a laboratory setting.TO BE CONT’D

A comparative analysis of religious and service mandates in faith-based organisations in Canada and India

Since the 1990s, states have rolled back funding for social service provision. The conventional wisdom among researchers is that these cuts led to a groundswell of faith-based organisations seeking to respond to the gaps in social service provision left by the diminished capacity of the state. Around the same time, leading scholars asked a pertinent question about whether or not social service workers could be employed within faith-based organisations (FBO) and remain committed to a progressive academic discipline such as social work and indeed to the broader liberal democratic ethos of North American society (Cnaan & Boddie, 2001). About 15 years has passed and we have been given glimpses of the answer through important work by researchers who have responded to this question (e.g., Sager, 2011). TO BE CONT’D

West Bolton Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan – home energy retrofit program

The West Bolton SNAP project will test methods for increasing the number of suburban households undertaking home energy retrofits in a neighbourhood of Caledon, Ontario with the aim of reducing residential energy consumption and the resulting GHG emissions. The Program will utilize locally targeted marketing, community events, and face-to-face Home Retrofit Consultations to engage households in West Bolton. The research will support a detailed program evaluation of the West Bolton SNAP home energy retrofit program, and enable knowledge generation around best practices for stimulating energy retrofit uptake through customized local engagement methods. Project reporting will express results and findings related to the experiences and behaviours of all participants. This information will contribute to informing on future approaches to reducing household GHG emissions in other Ontario communities.

Development of forest legacy-based mine reclamation techniques for recolonizing the soil food web and promoting vegetation establishment

The August 2014 tailings dam breach at the Mount Polley Mine, BC severely disturbed downstream forest ecosystems through erosion and tailings deposition. The impacted area presents an opportunity to research using ecosystem legacies (components that survive a disturbance) to rehabilitate disturbed sites. A field trial at Mount Polley is testing seedling establishment and soil food web recolonization using three soil legacy reclamation methods: transplants of forest soil into seedling planting holes; spatial belowground connection with the undisturbed forest; and bringing forest floor buried by tailings to the surface. Greenhouse experiments are investigating the volume of soil to transplant, the role of the soil biological community in soil transplants, and the potential for seedlings to regenerate soil legacies, promoting growth of the next generation of trees. TO BE CONT’D

Electroencephalogram signal enhancement using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for BCI applications

The electroencephalogram (EEG) reflects the neural electrical activity and used in brain-computer interface (BCI) systems which provide assistive technologies for people with various disabilities. The proposed research is mainly focused to apply Nonnegative matrix factorization for EEG signal enhancement for BCI applications to mitigate the limitations of existing BCI system such as slow speeds, limitation of hardware requirement and power dissipation and susceptibility to artifacts. The finding of the proposed research will contribute greatly to the benefit of the society considering that brain-computer interface used in various fields such as in advanced healthcare, neuroergonomics and smart environment, educational and self-regulation, security, and authentication fields. The expected outcome of the proposed project would be to deliver a sophisticated algorithm to process and analyze EEG data which can improve the performance of the existing BCI systems.

Environmental Regulations and Firm Performance

Environmental regulations have been widely used in all developed and some developing countries to mitigate pollution. While these regulations potentially reduce pollution, their impact on companies and businesses is unclear. Economists traditionally think that these regulations will increase production costs and deteriorate a firm’s position in market. However, modern economists argue that environmental regulations may foster innovation and help regulated firms boost their productivity. Despite decades of research how environmental regulations affect firm performance, results are subject to debate and we still continue
to find conflicting evidence which suggests that the existing studies are not sufficient and more precise evidence is needed in order to reach a robust conclusion. This project aims to identify the true effect of environmental regulations on the productivity of Indian manufacturing firms. TO BE CONT’D

Parallel implementation of the variant calling process using the UPMEM technology

Organisms have enormous amounts of instructions encoded in their DNA. When DNA sequences are found using sequencing methods, such as New Generation Sequencing, they are stored as very large datasets. Merely knowing the sequence of an organism’s DNA is not enough, however, and there needs to be further processing of the datasets to extract meaningful data about the organism’s cellular structure and function. The way to process DNA sequences in order to understand why certain cancers and other diseases occur is to look at the variance between the DNA sequences of organisms, this is called variant calling. In this project, we are implementing a more rapid and energy-efficient method to perform variant calling by using High Performance Computing techniques. The approach of this method will be the processing-in-memory architectures by using the UPMEM company’s DRAM chips.

Cost-benefit Analysis of Logistic Models Implemented in Operational Processes

ATB Financial is a large Alberta based full service financial institution. The Card Services

department was forrned 6 years ago and is growing rapidly. The Card Strategy team within

Card Services is developing models and processes to effectively manage marketing

campaigns, collections and fraud. The primary objective of this program is a detailed

cost/benefit analysis of a variety of strategy alternatives such as a dynamic interest rate

program, a new rewards structure, collection strategies, and several other risk reduction

strategies. Particular attention will be paid to the fact that managers want the technical

results in plain language.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Fluids in Petroleum Reservoir Core Plugs

This MITACS Accelerate project supports the development of new MR/MRI methods of interest and importance to the international petroleum industry. The project joins the UNB MRI Centre, the leading academic research lab in MRI of petroleum reservoir core plugs, with Green Imaging Technologies, the market leader internationally in the provision of MR/MRI methods for laboratory core analysis to the international petroleum industry. The project results will be incorporated into existing and future products and services sold by Green Imaging Technologies.