Innovative Projects Realized

L2M – Scalable 3D Digital Twin Creation for Large Scale Infrastructure Using Autonomous UAVs, NeRF, and Metaverse Platform

In Canada’s remote and weather-challenged regions, inspecting critical infrastructure like bridges or monitoring agricultural sites such as vertical farms often involves costly, dangerous, and infrequent field visits. This project explores whether there is a commercial market for a new platform that enables engineers to perform these inspections remotely, using virtual reality (VR), autonomous drones, and artificial intelligence.

The technology creates high-detail 3D digital replicas—called “digital twins”—of real-world assets like bridges. It uses drones to collect data, AI to automatically detect cracks or damage, and VR to let users inspect and collaborate without needing to be on site. The aim of this project is not to develop the technology further, but to validate whether infrastructure owners and operators would actually buy and use it. Through interviews with companies like Manitoba Hydro and municipal inspection teams, we will identify pain points, test pricing models, and determine how this system could best support Canada’s infrastructure needs.

If successful, this solution could significantly reduce inspection costs, improve safety, and help ensure early detection of problems in hard-to-reach areas—ultimately making Canada’s infrastructure smarter, safer, and more resilient.

Fabrication and Design internship

Seacork Studio is developing compostable architectural acoustic panels made from a seaweed biocomposite. This internship project will support Seacork in designing and producing a professional sample kit program, a impact-plaque system,and product photography. This creates a repeatable pipeline for design-firm outreach, accelerates specifications, and strengthens evidence-based sustainability storytelling at installs.

Further investigation of Paced Electrogram Fraction Analysis (PEFA)

The goal of this project is to develop a faster and more accurate way to detect ventricular tachycardia using an algorithm to analyze the signal results from Paced Electrogram Fractionation Analysis (PEFA); ideally real time through use of a basket catheter. St Jude Medical, our research partner, creates medical hardware specifically geared towards detecting and treating heart disease, including arrhythmia. If we are successful in our endeavor, they hope to gain an improved diagnostic system. This system will be more accurate than their old system (EnSite Velocity®), as it will use pacing rather than passive signals in the heart, and faster, as it will use a basket catheter to concurrently map all sites. The end result of this will be that fewer patients with ventricular tachycardia will be missed in hospitals and, in turn, fewer patents will present with associated diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and myocardial infarctions.

The development of a disposable stick-on hip protector for the prevention of hip fractures in hospitalized patients

Hip fractures exert a profound toll on the independence and quality of life of older people, and over 95% are due to falls. Over 2000 hip fractures occur annually in hospitals in Canada. Wearable hip protectors are a promising method for preventing hip fractures, but patient compliance in wearing traditional garment-based hip protectors averages below 20%. In this project, we will examine whether patient compliance in wearing the device is improved by a disposable, low cost stick-on hip protector, which provides increased force attenuation, and little risk for pad shifting, when compared to current devices. A pre-post intervention trial will be conducted in two wards at Surrey Memorial Hospital. Our sample size will allow us to detect a clinically meaningful difference of 20% in compliance. This project will immerse the intern in working with industry and clinical collaborators to evaluate new technology in the clinical environment. Our clinical trial results may provide our industry partner, Blue Tree, with an evidence base necessary for successful product marketing, and essential information for further design iterations.

Chimera One – Real-Time AI Mission Autonomy for UAV Operation

Every growing season, farmers face a race against time. Pests, disease, and drought can damage crops in days — but current drone and satellite tools often take 1–2 days to process data. By then, the opportunity to act may already be gone.

Chimera One is building a “real-time brain” for drones. Instead of sending images to the cloud and waiting for results, our technology processes them on the spot, during the flight. Within seconds, farmers know exactly where to look, whether it’s a patch of stressed wheat or a vineyard row needing attention.

Our system combines drone sensors (NDVI, RGB, thermal) with ground-based data (soil moisture, rainfall, canopy growth). This sensor fusion creates precise crop health maps, delivered instantly to a phone or tablet. The goal: make same-day action the norm, not the exception.

We’re starting with wheat and vineyards, partnering with leading agricultural institutions and growers to validate and refine the technology. By making insights immediate, Chimera One aims to help farmers protect yields, reduce chemical use, and work more efficiently — benefits that ripple across the entire agricultural value chain.

Open Scholarship and Artificial Intelligence

Digital technologies and practices—including social networking—are now pervasive and have been adopted society-wide. This creates new possibilities for engagement and interaction among academic professionals, research partners, collaborators, stakeholders, students, and additional members of the
public. This project focuses on continuing to advance the research, analysis, and engagement of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons: an open, digital platform for research collaboration and sharing – working in theoretical and pragmatic terms to understand how best to leverage digital research infrastructures to advance open, social scholarship in ways that speak to the needs of humanities and social sciences communities. It does so in the context of generative artificial intelligence.

This collaboration builds on and extends previous Mitacs-funded work, and is undertaken by a multi-career level team at the University of Victoria in its Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments SSHRC-funded Partnership. When complete, the Canadian HSS Commons will serve communities such as those represented by Iter Canada and groups beyond, as it empowers individual researchers to develop, exchange, and share open access publications, drafts, preprints, datasets, and teaching materials through a national-scale, multilingual (including French and
English) platform, which combines many features of institutional repositories and social networking sites.

Rapid next generation infectious disease diagnostics for tuberculosis and leptospirosis

Infectious diseases remain one of the largest killers of the human population and disproportionately so in developing countries. Assays for the rapid and comprehensive identification of causative strains of the infectious disease agents in tuberculosis and leptospirosis is currently lacking. These infections represent over 20 million cases annually. Existing diagnostic protocols involve lengthy and resource-intensive procedures which substantially hinder the timely administration of treatment regimens. This project aims to combine cutting edge molecular biology protocols with next generation DNA sequencing and cloud computing resources to develop superior diagnostic assays for tuberculosis and leptospirosis. The intern will conduct the wet lab experiments required for developing these assays, bridging the molecular assay design steps with the cloud computing implementation of interpreting assay test results. The project objectives and logistical requirements are well matched to Fusion Genomics’ expertise and research mandate, in further developing the company’s suite of next generation clinical diagnostics products.

Impacts de la production d’hydroélectricité sur les écosystèmesaquatiques : Développement d’indicateurs environnementaux pourl’approche du cycle de vie (ACV)

In boreal and temperate regions, dams are mainly constructed to provide ecosystem services such as hydroelectricity
production. River impoundment and the alteration of natural hydrological regimes are suggested to be major disturbances to aquatic ecosystems. To meet long-term environmental objectives for sustainable development, Hydro-Quebec recently adopted the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. LCA is an ISO standardized approach assessing the potential environmental impacts of product, services and processes throughout its entire life cycle. However, the LCA approach presently lacks strong empirical evidence of the effect of hydroelectricity production on aquatic ecosystems. which increase uncertainty in a decision making process and leaves hydroelectricity production under risk of criticism regarding this known gap in LCA and water footprint assessment. The proposed project aims at developing scientifically-sound environmental indicators to quantify the impact of hydroelectricity production on aquatic ecosystems and to integrate them into the LCA approach.

JMCC Seating and Mobility Program – Custom Fabrication and Modification

The John McGivney Children’s Centre (JMCC) provides rehabilitation and support services to children and youth with disabilities in Windsor-Essex. One of its key services is Seating and Mobility, which ensures that children have customized equipment—such as wheelchairs and adaptive seating—that helps them participate in daily life safely and comfortably. This project proposes placing a student from St. Clair College’s Biotech Engineering Program as an intern within JMCC’s Seating and Mobility team. The intern’s technical skills will allow the Centre to go beyond day-to-day operations and advance innovation in equipment customization and fabrication. This initiative will help develop clinical protocols, create reusable templates, and improve overall service delivery.

Conception et implantation d’un cadre de gestion de projets pour une start-up en innovation

Le stagiaire réalisera une analyse des meilleures pratiques, évaluera les processus existants et proposera des recommandations afin de mettre en place un cadre de gestion de projets innovants efficace. Ceci permettra à LT de mieux gérer les attentes et les demandes des clients, de prioriser les fonctionnalités et d’aligner la stratégie produit sur les objectifs commerciaux de l’entreprise. Cette expérience de stage sera bénéfique pour LT en renforçant sa capacité à développer et à commercialiser efficacement son produit sur différents marchés, et en améliorant sa compétitivité dans ses nombreux segments cibles.

Mieux comprendre pour mieux cibler : exploration intelligente des indications oncologiques adaptées aux thérapies conditionnelles

9Bio est une entreprise spécialisée dans l’ingénierie de protéines thérapeutiques pour l’oncologie. Cette jeune pousse a développé une plateforme de biologie structurale computationnelle dont le but est d’aider à la conception de traitements thérapeutiques qui ciblent sélectivement les tumeurs en fonction des signatures métabolomiques et chimiques uniques du microenvironnement tumoral, tout en épargnant les tissus sains.

Ce projet vise à améliorer la plateforme de 9Bio, plus particulièrement les prédictions associées à l’utilisation d’anticorps thérapeuthiques et à leur activation conditionnelle en microenvironnement tumorale. La diversité et la variabilité interindividuelle des microenvironnements tumoraux, ainsi que par le manque de données liant ces caractéristiques aux mécanismes d’activation conditionnelle rendent cette analyse complexe. L’étudiante aura donc pour objectif de collecter et structurer de nombreuses sources de données (ex: données biologiques, cliniques, entretiens avec des experts du domaines) pour mieux comprendre des indications oncologiques et identifier les biomarqueurs associés à des conditions chimio-physiologiques propices à ce type d’activation. Ces données seront ensuite structurées sous forme de graphes de connaissance. Des règles logiques seront induites des résultats, puis intégrées dans la plateforme de 9Bio. Ces travaux serviront donc de base pour améliorer les performances des algorithmes prédictifs intégrés à notre plateforme.

Cette initiative permettra de développer des thérapies plus sécuritaires, avantageuses non seulement pour les patients, mais aussi pour les hôpitaux et le gouvernement du Québec. Sur le plan économique, elle renforcera notre potentiel par des collaborations avec des partenaires biopharmaceutiques, générant des retombées concrètes pour le Québec : emplois hautement qualifiés, capitaux étrangers et dynamisation de l’écosystème d’innovation.

Impacts of hydroelectricity production on aquatic ecosystems: Development of key environmental indicators for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach

In boreal and temperate regions, dams are mainly constructed to provide ecosystem services such as hydroelectricity
production. River impoundment and the alteration of natural hydrological regimes are suggested to be major disturbances to aquatic ecosystems. To meet long-term environmental objectives for sustainable development, Hydro-Quebec recently adopted the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. LCA is an ISO standardized approach assessing the potential environmental impacts of product, services and processes throughout its entire life cycle. However, the LCA approach presently lacks strong empirical evidence of the effect of hydroelectricity production on aquatic ecosystems. which increase uncertainty in a decision making process and leaves hydroelectricity production under risk of criticism regarding this known gap in LCA and water footprint assessment. The proposed project aims at developing scientifically-sound environmental indicators to quantify the impact of hydroelectricity production on aquatic ecosystems and to integrate them into the LCA approach.