Innovative Projects Realized

Explore thousands of successful projects resulting from collaboration between organizations and post-secondary talent.

13270 Completed Projects

1072
AB
2795
BC
430
MB
106
NF
348
SK
4184
ON
2671
QC
43
PE
209
NB
474
NS

Projects by Category

10%
Computer science
9%
Engineering
1%
Engineering - biomedical
4%
Engineering - chemical / biological

Study of the performance of borehole thermal energy storage systems for provision of renewable heating

Thermal energy storage (TES) systems are suitable to bridge the existing mismatch between demand and supply. In current study, borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) is selected due to its advantages. The performance of the BTES can be affected by several factors in different patterns including design, operation, and geological and material properties. Although it has been proven that the BTES systems can be effectively dealt with the seasonal energy intermittency issues, the heat transfer mechanisms involved in these systems has not been thoroughly and systematically studied in previous explorations. Therefore, this research aims to conduct the thermal performance analysis of the innovative concept of coupling the thermal solar collectors to a BTES system to store surplus solar energy and provide upgraded heat when heating demand is raised on a Canadian residential building.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Seyed Ali Ghoreishi-Madiseh

Student:

Sajjan Pokhrel

Partner:

2356268 Ontario Ltd

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Real estate and rental and leasing

University:

University of British Columbia

Program:

Accelerate

Testing Tile Drain Phosphorous Removal with a Novel Carboxymethylcellulose-iron Hydrogel Filtration Matrix

The objective of this research is to reduce the loss phosphate (P) used as fertilizer into waterways. Accumulation of phosphate in rivers and lakes leads to premature lake aging and high P-content allows growth and proliferation of algae, which degrade quality of drinking water, aquatic habitat, and recreational utilization of waterways.
The environmentally friendly compound carboxymethyl cellulose in combination with iron forms stable gel beads and when placed in water, bind and retain phosphate. This project aims to produce the beads on an industrial scale and field-test this novel P-filtration system at two farm tile drainage systems in the Lower Thames River near Chatham-Kent and Bruce Peninsula, in Southern Ontario.
Partners will benefit from a demonstration system for the low-cost and efficient P-removal. The wide range utilization of the P-binding matrix and the tile drain filtration systems will reduce P-load in waterways thus lowering the incidence of harmful algal blooms.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Bulent Mutus

Student:

David Ure;Sara Hassanzadehroknabadi

Partner:

Bruce Peninsula Biosphere Association

Discipline:

Biochemistry / Molecular biology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Windsor

Program:

Accelerate

COVID19 tools to enable contact free advanced microscopy, remote training and technical support while maintaining physical distancing

After complete shutdown, gradual return of research productivity needs to be maximized while still maintaining safe working conditions and minimizing the potential for transmission of the coronavirus. The gold standard of advanced microscopy is to provide access to key infrastructure which should also include advanced research support from microscopy specialists. In order to use the infrastructure to its full potential, researchers require in- depth ongoing support from expert microscopy specialists. This type of research support is impossible to offer with the current COVID-19 physical distancing limitations. The project aims to develop human-machine interactive tools for voice control contact free microscopy, Augmented Reality (AR) tools for audio/video communication between users and microscopy specialists for remote research support and an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant to continuously harness the best available resources online.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Claire Brown;Jérôme Waldispühl

Student:

Barbara Da Rocha

Partner:

BMU Labs

Discipline:

Other

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

McGill University

Program:

Baseline inventory of key biophysical and geomorphological features along the Lulu Island foreshore and the potential effects of sea level rise on marsh vegetation communities and restoration efforts

This research focuses on creating and implementing a sampling methodology to collect information on vegetation communities and soils along the Lulu Island foreshore in Steveston, BC. This information will be used to examine how the plant communities of natural marsh areas in this area change based on certain environmental parameters (e.g. elevation, salinity, tidal inundation) and how foreshore marsh areas may be impacted by sea level rise. Researchers and organizations may replicate these methods to monitor changes in the Lulu Island marsh vegetation community over time or project managers and agencies may wish to replicate these methods at restoration and compensation sites to adaptively manage their projects. Baseline data collected may also help to inform organizations conducting restoration in this area (e.g. Raincoast) and may help to guide future restoration efforts.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Kim Ives

Student:

Erin Vekic

Partner:

Raincoast Conservation Foundation

Discipline:

Environmental sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

British Columbia Institute of Technology

Program:

Accelerate

Automatic Question-Answer Generation from Educational Texts

As online educational platforms and blogs such as Coursera, Edublog, Korbit Technologies Inc. etc. are becoming increasingly popular, a great way for students to learn is to solve QA problems on educational texts. Students also learn by getting answers to their questions. Since manual QA generation of huge content of educational texts seems impracticable, an important research goal is to create natural question-answer generation systems from reading comprehension materials. Neural sequential models (e.g. LSTMs, Transformers etc.) are able to generate natural questions by paying attention to important part of texts and have improved state-of-the-art on many QA datasets, and also helped develop new datasets. In this research project, we will investigate how we can leverage current state-of-the-art NLP neural models for question-answering generation. We are equally interested in identifying lesser worked areas such as conversational QA (which helps develop intelligent agents that can drive QA style conversations and test user understanding of passage), exploiting active learning by querying the student for questions in-case of insufficient labelled data), crowdsourcing educational blogs for use in building QA models.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Siva Reddy

Student:

Devang Kulshreshtha

Partner:

Korbit Technologies

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

McGill University

Program:

Accelerate

Point-of-Need Microfluidic Biosensor for Detecting Airborne Viruses using Molecularly Imprinted Polymers: Towards COVID 19 Virus Monitoring

This project is a partnership between York University and Sixth Wave Innovation Inc. (SIXW). The goal of this partnership is to develop components of a portable and low-cost technology for rapid and on-site air sampling and detection of aerosol viruses in indoor and outdoor environments. Virus capturing will be done by Molecularly Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) under the extensive expertise of the partner company. MIPs are robust materials with pre-made nano-cavities that can capture target objects such as viruses in this project. For this, MIP-based nanoparticles for microwire coating and surface immobilization of viruses will be designed and optimized. MIP-virus conjugation will be investigated in microfluidic devices. Finally, on-chip virus capturing, tagging with detection labels, and quantitative detection will be performed electrically. This project will result in innovative scientific research, mobilization of research from conception to proof of concept stage, and lab-scale development and integration of sample preparation and virus detection devices. These integrated sample preparation and detection systems will be portable, easy to operate, and sensitive for future use by inspectors, businesses, hospitals, special care centers, and police force involved in decision-making to address various challenges associated with airborne pathogen outbreaks and pandemics.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Pouya Rezai;Satinder Kaur Brar

Student:

Ali Doostmohammadi

Partner:

Sixth Wave

Discipline:

Engineering - mechanical

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

York University

Program:

Accelerate

Understanding 3D Spatial-Data from Health, Trade and Customer Service VR Training Simulator

The proposed research is a collaboration between Virtro and SFU’s iVizLab to collaboratively work on ways to understand the processes involved in analyzing and visualizing 3D spatial data. iVizLab’s research focuses on AI based computational models, in this case a data visualization tool that help users analyze 3D spatial data. In creating this user interface, the iVizLab will help teachers find insights and make sense of the errors their students do in a VR training simulator to provide personalized feedback to each student. The intern will be working closely with the partner organization to work on understanding the needs of the analyst and to translate them into an easy to use system. Further, the intern will be working on ways to apply machine-learning methods that help simplify the process of analyzing complex data.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Steve DiPaola

Student:

Mayra Donaji Barrera Machuca

Partner:

Virtro

Discipline:

Interactive arts and technology

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

Simon Fraser University

Program:

Accelerate

Evaluation of microbolometer-based imager for wildfire radiometric imaging

Monitoring of wildland fires through infra-red remote sensing has become increasing of interest to the wildland fire management community, and quality scientific analysis of the capabilities of such sensors is critical if they are to be used in any operational way. In 2019 a joint burning experiment was carried out over several days. In 2019 a collaboration between the Canadian Forest Service, Institut national d’optique (INO), and the University of Toronto saw the ignition and monitoring of a series of experimental fires in the field at a CFS field research station. During these experiments, a series fires were observed using conventional cooled infrared imagers alongside a novel imager built by INO. This study conducts spatial and temporal analysis of coincident infrared data to assess the performance of the INO system for the application of wildfire imaging and radiometry.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Mike Wotton;Josh Johnston

Student:

Melanie Wheatley

Partner:

Institut National d’Optique

Discipline:

Architecture and design

Sector:

University:

University of Toronto

Program:

Accelerate

Brazing Metallurgies and Processes for Attaching Sintered Carbide Tiles – Year two

A two-year study on brazing technologies used for sintered tungsten carbide tiles is proposed to address the following technical objectives: 1) brazing metallurgy for sintered tungsten carbide and substrate high strength steel, 2) adherence mechanisms between different braze compositions and carbide tiles, 3) brazing parameters for optimized brazed joint performance, and 4) the mechanical stresses developed through the brazing process. The goals of the project will be 1) a full understanding of the current technologies used to braze carbide tiles, and 2) recommendations for the selection of braze metallurgies for optimum brazed tungsten carbide performance. The findings in this project will be used as a foundation for a guideline on brazing technologies. InnoTech Alberta, our funding partner, will use the findings to oil companies and equipment manufactures, leading to increased durability and reliability of mining equipment.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Leijun Li

Student:

Nitin Kumar Sharma

Partner:

InnoTech Alberta Inc

Discipline:

Engineering - chemical / biological

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Alberta

Program:

Elevate

Translation of recent evidence on the effect of sugars on cardiometabolic health – Year two

The proposed project includes 2 objectives: (1) provision of high quality evidence on the effect of specific food sources of sugars on cardiometabolic risk factors by conducting multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses (SRMAs), to address the effect of replacing sugar-sweetened beverages with either diet pop or water in a randomized controlled clinical trial, and to analyze and report national data from StatsCan on current sugars consumption, and (2) efforts to translate the evidence from these studies both directly to the public and indirectly through communications to clinicians and public policy makers, in addition to developing training programs on how to conduct high quality SRMAs in nutrition research. The partnership will focus on the development of better translation strategies which are greatly needed to convey important messages directly from the scientific literature and not to allow misinterpreted results from the media to be a central avenue of information for the public. A main goal of the Canadian Sugar Institute (CSI) is to provide science-based Nutrition Information. Through this partnership, CSI will benefit from the tremendous expertise of the intern in conducting SRMAs, allowing CSI to provide more accurate and clear information on the role of sugars in the diet to health.

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Faculty Supervisor:

John L Sievenpiper

Student:

Laura Chiavaroli

Partner:

Canadian Sugar Institute

Discipline:

Food science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Toronto

Program:

Elevate

Determination of oxygen stability and shelf life of cannabidiol oil formulations.

We intend to develop standardized protocols for oxygen stability and shelf life testing of cannabidiol oil formulations. Overall, we will study the effect of time, O2 pressure, temperature, and sample quantity on the oxidation of different formulations, and how this accelerated oxidation profile can be extrapolated/modelled to predict long term shelf life under ambient conditions. As with any product, increased shelf life decreases production costs for the supplier. This work will afford graduate students the opportunity to gain experience in an expanding industry. Furthermore, this project will be beneficial to Anton-Paar as they develop accurate and economic analytical equipment for this industry.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Drew Marquardt

Student:

Stuart Castillo

Partner:

Anton Paar

Discipline:

Biochemistry / Molecular biology

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

University of Windsor

Program:

Accelerate

The human dimensions of wetlands and waterfowl conservation: Developing measures of stakeholder involvement in conservation activities and nature-based recreation

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) is an international partnership to conserve abundant and resilient waterfowl populations and sustainable landscapes. Through their work with the four Canadian NAWMP Joint Ventures, Ducks Unlimited Canada collaborate on waterfowl and habitat management issues, including social issues that are relevant to wetland and waterfowl conservation. This project will increase the human dimensions capacity of the Joint Venture community and develop and measure repeatable indicators of conservation and nature-based recreation involvement among wetlands and waterfowl conservation stakeholders in Canada. This project involves three studies that will (1) identify relevant stakeholders with interests in waterfowl and wetlands conservation, (2) identify measures of conservation and nature-based recreation involvement, and (3) test and implement these measures in a national web-based survey of waterfowl and wetlands conservation stakeholders.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Howard Harshaw

Student:

Katherine Sainsbury

Partner:

Ducks Unlimited Canada

Discipline:

Kinesiology

Sector:

University:

University of Alberta

Program:

Accelerate

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