Innovative Projects Realized

Analyzing Gaps in Diversity Practices at The Scarborough Hospital using the Diversity Institute’s Diversity Audit Tool

This project is a systemic review and assessment of diversity strategies currently in place at The Scarborough Hospital using the Diversity Institute’s Diversity Audit Tool (DAT). The DAT was developed based on research into leading practices and offers a lens through which diversity strategies can be analyzed; this will be the first time that it is applied to an organization within the healthcare sector. The DAT will be used to measure the policies and practices aimed at increasing diversity (in both its client base and the organization itself) currently in place at The Scarborough Hospital by comparing them to the leading practices identified by the DAT. Special attention will be paid in the subsequent analysis to the strengths and weaknesses of the tool to identify key areas within this healthcare sector as well as to identify areas of improvement. Furthermore, the interpretive framework for analysis will be informed by a targeted literature review, enabling the student to recommend alternatives and future action.

Silica Breccia Supplementary Cement Material Key Properties (phase 2)

The project is focusing on developing a silica breccias product having a superior reactivity that allows this product to be used widely as an alternative supplementary cementing material in cement mixtures. The new developed silica breccias product will be tested for effectiveness as a supplementary cementing material based on the Canadian Standard Association (CSA) test methods prior to acceptance. Tests on other common supplementary cementing material such as fly, ash, silica fume, and metakaolin will also be conducted on counterpart specimens for comparison. The partner organization will gain valuable insight about the performance of different silica breccia genesis in cement mixtures. The project will aid the partner organization to optimize their product development processes and help them achieve their business goals. 

This research project was undertaken and completed with a grant from and the financial assistance of Petroleum Research Newfoundland & Labrador.

Smart Oceans: Instrumented, Interconnected, Intelligent Systems for Efficient Data Analysis and Querying

This project intends to investigate new ways to make data collected through Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) underwater observatory provided by the NEPTUNE and VENUS projects  available to both scientists and the general public. The research will firstly focus on efficiency, experimenting with and comparing technologies as applied to the computationally intensive processing of the vast amounts of data collected by ONC. These technologies will include both parallelization strategies in the form of programming languages and database support in the form of tools to support data retrieval. Further, we will investigate the use of these database management strategies to facilitate the integration of data to provide answers interesting queries by ocean scientists and feed useful visualizations of this data.

Design and Development of Unmanned Air Systems

Quaternion Engineering Inc. (QEI) is developing a series of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) optimized to address the growing demand for low cost, turnkey commercial and military solutions. Recent market research has shown an emerging commercial market for UAVs in applications such as small scale surveillance, remote sensing and inspection. As this market emerges there will be a large demand for affordable application specific unmanned systems that are easy and inexpensive to operate. Currently, Canada has relatively modest capabilities in terms of UAS and UAV development. However, there appears to be significant opportunities for Western Canada to progressively establish a strong niche position in the UAV industry in specific areas that could even include original UAV designs that are conceived from the ground up, to respond specifically to emerging regulatory requirements and to current and future sensor characteristics. At the end of the project QEI will have commercially available and operationally tested unmanned systems with a high technology readiness level and several products are envisaged such as novel flight platforms, payload integration and stabilization systems and low-cost auto-pilot systems.

Hardware-in-Loop Simulation and Test Facility for Re-Purposed Battery Energy Storage Systems

Hybrid vehicles have been in use for well over a decade now and have gained momentum in popularity ever since. When these vehicles reach their end of life, their battery packs often have a considerable amount of residual life. Although their state-of-health may not be suitable for vehicular application any longer, they can be re-used in a different setting where they can store and provide energy for remote and off-grid loads such as small communities in the North. This project aims to develop an advanced computer modeling and test platform to investigate various options for using re-purposed battery packs for grid storage applications. 

User Interface Research for Stereoscopic 3D Animation System

Janro Imaging Laboratory (JIL) will work with researchers at Concordia and Emily Carr universities to develop 3D motion-tracking based interface tools for drawing and content creation in spatial drawing applications. As a basis for applied design research, researchers will use an alpha version of the “Optical Wand,” a product currently in development at JIL for use with SANDDE, the animator works in the stereoscopic environment itself and can therefore make changes intuitively and rapidly to the spatial composition of their work in 3D and in real time. The expected result of this project is the invention of an optimal gesture-based interface for drawing directly in 3D stereoscopic space in professional animation applications. The resulting invention would be an unprecedented interface tool, which can be produced using Direct Digital Manufacturing and as such, is likely to be of much interest to gaming, live performance art, etc. Gesture-based interactivity research is only just beginning and we expect our results to have a significant impact on this field. With an enhanced interface and a wider user-base targeted, JIL anticipates that SANDDE could feasibly become an industry-standard stereoscopic 3D animation tool – and part of Quebec’s rich market for similar technologies. 

Virtual testing platform for design and optimization of cantilever-type sensors

Using a multiphysics approach, the intern will construct a model for the topological optimization of two distinct classes of cantilever-type sensors: one often encountered in the general industrial application and the other one customized for the specific needs of a biosensor. Altair Hyperworks will be the main software tool to be used for this particular type of optimization and the aforementioned type of sensors will be modeled and their behavior simulated in complex multiphysics conditions. These results will generate a software platform useful for testing several types of sensors (material-wise and class-wise) under diverse loading conditions (force, temperature, pressure, humidity) and will help the sponsor company in generating a portfolio on the niche of the market requesting such type of numeric modeling and simulation. On the same time, the results are of great value for the biological sensor developed by the intern in order to obtain his PhD degree. The student will benefit from the interaction with the company’s employees observing their needs and values which will further help to better adapt to the needs of the work market. 

Analysis and Matching of Donors and Charities Using Machine Learning and Data Mining Techniques

Dexterity Consulting is a company that aims to maximize the impact of donors’ donations to charities. Dexterity Consulting offers a service to match donors to charities, based on the alignment of the donors’ preferences and the charities goals. This matching process is currently being done manually by an expert in the field, working at Dexterity Consulting. The proposed research aims to develop an automated system to replace the current matching process. In addition, the research aims to validate the current process used by the expert, by using various data mining approaches and comparing their results to the results from established algorithms. In the end, we will produce and recommend a set of data mining techniques for more advance and in depth analysis of the donor and charity characteristics.

Exploring document navigation and interaction on mobile devices

PDFTron Systems Inc. specializes in PDF, SVG, XPS and other graphics technologies. As a leading global provider of cross-platform, high-performance products, it has helped customers worldwide from different disciplines. Based on the success of its product – PDFNet SDK on desktops, PDFTron is motivated to expand their technology to a fast-growing market – hand-held touch screen devices. But with limited CPU and display surfaces of tables, new challenges emerge to minimize lag, flicker, and other viewing artifacts. PDFTron has developed a tiling-algorithm to address some of these issues. In this project, we wish to improve a number of shortcomings of the current algorithm so that it can produce better document navigation and interaction experience on mobile devices. The research on the current algorithm will prepare PDFTron to transform their technology to all kinds of mobile touch screen devices. 

Automatic Code Partitioning for XPU Acceleration

Based on 7 years of R&D, Secodix has developed a processor, the XPU, that is faster by two orders of magnitudes compared to existing processors. To leverage the technology, we need to provide software programmers the ability to use existing programming languages (in particular, C++) while benefiting from XPU performance. To enable that, we need to develop tools and methods that can take performance-critical portions of software and accelerate them on the XPU. The aim of this project is to investigate those techniques. While the research organization will benefit by expanding its knowledge on utilizing high-performance architectures, the partner organization will benefit by incorporating research results into its products. The ability to use existing programming languages is one of the key product requirements that are being driven by Secodix’s customers.

Product Recommendation and Decision Making Tool

During this Mitacs project, our goal is to investigate how effectively Optemo can extend the intelligent that is built upon the retailer’s business intelligence as well as aggregated and in-session experience to the product detail page. To achieve this goal different approaches that are proposed in the literature will be implemented and tested. The objective of this project is to research, design and prototype a hybrid approach that takes business intelligence, historical user behaviour and the relationship between products and customers as well as direct customer feedback into the account.

Development of “Winter Condition” Operational Performance Functions (OPFs) for Ontario Highway and Freeway Road Segments for Ministry of Transportation Ontario

Many real-world industries depend on the safe and efficient functioning of transportation systems, facilities and infrastructures. One of the main concerns for such industries is vehicle accidents. The Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) currently uses very basic models to determine the operational performance functions (OPFs) for all highways. The drawback of the current models is that they do not account for changes in environment factors, such as adverse weather, which is abundant during winter months in Canada. Such environmental factors are important since the effects of rapidly changing winter weather conditions can have a significant impact on driving conditions. The main objective of this project is to develop a set of winter OPFs for highways in Ontario. The development of winter OPFs will provide a  tool for the assessment of safety performance of highway infrastructures under adverse weather condition, and will allow for the identification of highway segments that have low levels of safety.