Innovative Projects Realized

New User Enrollment System

Digital Link Inc., a leader in IT support, digital marketing, and web design, is addressing inefficiencies in its client onboarding process through the development of a New User Enrollment System. The current manual process is prone to delays, errors, and lacks transparency, leading to challenges in client satisfaction and operational efficiency. This new system will automate and streamline the entire onboarding experience, offering a secure, scalable, and user-friendly platform.

The New User Enrollment System will feature a web-based portal where clients can register and submit information easily. Back-end processes will validate and process data in real time, eliminating manual errors and significantly speeding up approvals. The system will also integrate with communication platforms to provide automated updates, ensuring transparency for clients throughout the process. Advanced security measures will protect sensitive data, while the system’s scalability will accommodate future business growth.

This project is expected to deliver significant benefits, including increased operational efficiency, reduced administrative costs, and improved client satisfaction. By processing over 90% of enrollment requests within 24 hours, Digital Link will enhance its reputation as a leader in client-focused digital solutions. The system also aligns with environmental sustainability goals by eliminating paper-based processes, reducing waste, and supporting sustainable practices.

Assessing Content Authenticity Through Data-Driven Studies and Visual Insights

The proposed project aims to enhance Originality.ai’s role in the evolving digital content industry by addressing challenges in content authenticity and originality. The project focuses on creating impactful studies and data visualizations that leverage large datasets to evaluate trends, technologies, and methodologies in AI-generated content detection. By developing proprietary insights and tools, this initiative will strengthen Originality.ai’s competitive edge and thought leadership in the field. The expected benefits include improved tools and resources for clients, elevated credibility in content integrity solutions, and valuable contributions to advancing ethical practices in the digital content ecosystem.

Content centric networks

The advent of smartphones and the associated change in usage patterns indicates that carrier voice revenues are constantly going down and are expected to almost vanish in the near future. Data revenues are picking up but not at a rate which will make up for the shortfall in voice revenues. Also, the increase in data revenue is accompanied by a corresponding increase in traffic. This leads to higher costs in deploying and operating networks as well as a significant growth in network complexity. In this project we will be working on
= Mechanisms to optimize network usage by increasing utilization
= Optimizations for content delivery
= Simplified network architectures
= Mechanisms for reducing operating costs (including transport & peering)

How Might Striving for Social Wealth impact the Social Wellbeing of Remote and Hybrid Leaders?

This research project will explore how the pursuit of social wealth can impact the social health and well-being of remote and hybrid leaders. Building on the concepts of Social Wellbeing, Social Capital, and Social Wealth, I propose a continuum from loneliness to Social Wealth, where Social Wealth represents an abundance of meaningful, reciprocal social connections. Research shows that loneliness affects up to 65% of full-time remote workers and 72% of senior executives, costing companies $4,200 per lonely employee per year due to lost productivity and absenteeism. By engaging in this evidence-based program, Sun Life will gain insights into the social connectedness of its 2,500 remote and hybrid leaders. The project includes group workshops and coaching sessions guiding 12 hybrid leaders to engage in a social media detox, map their personal and professional relationships, and take inspired action towards sustained social health and well-being – within and beyond the workplace. This initiative could set the stage for a new social health pillar at Sun Life, with potential for broader application, aiming to enhance productivity and reduce absenteeism typically associated with loneliness.

Improving Differentially Private Deep Learning Models

Machine Learning (ML) models are known to leak information about the data they were
trained on, enabling membership and reconstruction attacks [7]. Such privacy risks damage trust in ML, and hinder the broad adoption of model co-training, through Federated Learning or cloud-based co-training. This is especially true in sensitive domains that could significantly benefit from data pooling, such as medical or financial applications. While rigorous privacy preserving model training techniques exist, such as those based on Differential Privacy (DP), they still impose a heavy performance penalty. This project aims to better understand the impact of training data on model privacy leakage, and develop new optimization techniques to improve Deep Learning with Differential Privacy.

Biais de publication des études examinant les risques associés aux médicaments pris pendant la grossesse

Devant le nombre grandissant d’études sur l’effet des médicaments pris pendant la grossesse, les chercheurs et cliniciens sont confrontés à une multitude de résultats, parfois contradictoires. Les méta-analyses peuvent aider à évaluer la qualité et à synthétiser ces études. Les résultats des méta-analyses peuvent toutefois être biaisés par le biais de publication, qui survient lorsque la publication des études est influencée par la signification statistique, la force ou la direction des résultats. Ce biais a peu été documenté dans les études sur l’impact de la prise de médicaments pendant la grossesse. Le projet de recherche est une étude descriptive de méta-épidémiologie dont l’objectif principal est de quantifier l’importance du biais de publication dans les études analytiques examinant les impacts de la prise de médicaments pendant la grossesse pour la mère et l’enfant, à l’aide de la plateforme française metaPreg. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que le domaine du risque médicamenteux pendant la grossesse présente aussi un biais de publication important et cherchons à le documenter. Il est attendu que le projet de recherche entraine un changement dans les pratiques de recherche et de publication, ce qui se traduira par l’amélioration des recommandations dans le domaine de l’innocuité des médicaments pendant la grossesse.

The Empowerment of China’s Left-behind Women

Feminization of agriculture is occurring in China through the rural-urban migration of labor, predominantly men. This phenomenon raises the question: Does women’s increasing participation in farming affect their capacity and power in decision-making regarding agricultural production and their rural livelihood? While little research has been done to address this issue due to the measurement challenges, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) offers a way to correct this deficiency. This study is the first attempt to apply the WEAI in China. The WEAI modules and method will be localized for the context of China, reflecting both
language and institutional characteristics. The left-behind women’s WEAI score is expected to be higher than those women from households without any migrant workers. The results of the research cannot only be applied to evaluate the on-going public programs funded by the government, but they are also useful in formulating policy interventions to empower rural women in general.

Étude d’impact du Plan Montagnes de Destination Québec-cité

En 2023, Destination Québec-cité proposait un plan Montagnes au ministère du Tourisme du Québec afin de marquer son engagement à contribuer à l’essor d’un secteur touristique durable. Ce plan, spécifique à la région touristique de Québec, vise à favoriser une offre de service sur 4 saisons et l’adoption de bonnes pratiques pour un tourisme durable et responsable, tout en considérant les spécificités de chaque territoire. Le plan se déploie à l’échelle des 4 MRC de la couronne verte (Jacques-Cartier, Portneuf, île d’Orléans et Côte-de-Beaupré), ainsi que sur le territoire de Wendake. Dans le présent projet, le stagiaire procèdera à une évaluation de l’impact de la démarche d’innovation sociale proposée par Destination Québec-cité afin d’identifier et documenter les facteurs favorisant le changement et l’adoption de bonnes pratiques en matière de tourisme durable.

Développement d’un filtre biologique pour l’élimination du manganèse des eaux potables

Ce projet de recherche vise à développer un nouveau procédé pour éliminer le fer et le manganèse des eaux souterraines destinées à la consommation humaine. Pour y arriver, nous testerons l’utilisation de filtres avec deux couches de matériaux réactifs activés biologiquement qui permettent de prolonger les durées de cycle et d’éliminer dans un seul filtre le fer et le manganèse. Enfin, nous évaluerons la possibilité d’utiliser des matériaux activés chimiquement plutôt que biologiquement afin de permettre une mise en application plus rapide de cette technologie.

Heat or Eat: Uncovering the Energy Poverty Gap in Income-Based Energy Burden Metrics

Income-based energy burden metrics identify households in energy poverty as those which spend 10% or more of their after-tax income on dwelling energy bills, risking the inability to maintain thermal comfort. However, traditional income-based energy poverty metrics fail to capture behavioral adaptation patterns of reducing energy consumption to limit financial expenditure on energy services, especially for low-income households. The inflection temperature, defined in this scope as the outdoor temperature at which households start using heating systems, is one form of energy-limiting behavior primarily adopted to reduce financial stress from energy services. As such, energy-limiting behavior introduces a gap in the energy poverty metric, which can be quantified based on the difference in the inflection
temperatures between low and high-income groups. Motivated by this, this research aims to estimate the heating equity gap, assessing the overlap between both measures as well as uncovering the complementary aspect of energy insecurity based on income. By capturing the gap in the existing income-based energy poverty metric, the multidimensional nature of energy poverty can be captured and classified according to severity, allowing for targeted interventions prioritizing high-risk households.

Design of Novel Self-Cooling Can Systems

Temperature control is very important to a modern day society. Certain beverages, such as soda pop, alcoholic beverages, and even water are refrigerated so that they are more refreshing to drink. This project objective is to design novel environmentally benign and emission-free self-cooling beverage cans. Two different systems with different cooling approached are considered. The first system is built on chemical reaction that does not evolve any harm output that the user will be exposed to, and the other system uses the physical principle of cooling with expansion and absorption. It is desired to design, manufacture and test the proposed systems the commercialization potential in the canning industry

Transfer of energy and momentum across turbulent interfaces (TEMATI)

Accurately predicting entrainment in free shear flows like jets, wakes, and shallow water shear layers is crucial for industrial, environmental, and geophysical applications, yet most studies focus on wakes and jets using Eulerian statistics from 2D experiments, limiting insight into this inherently 3D, multiscale phenomenon. To bridge this gap, we will conduct cutting-edge measurements capturing 3D Lagrangian statistics, generating novel datasets that will deepen our understanding of turbulent entrainment and mixing between distinct turbulent streams. This research has direct industrial relevance, particularly in wind farms, where wake interactions with ambient turbulence impact efficiency, often leading to reliance on empirical models for wake spreading. A more precise characterization of entrainment in shear-layers will help to develop models to characterize pollutant dispersion in rivers, and the mixing phenomena across two flow streams.