Innovative Projects Realized

Modelling pollutant removal processes for an underground detention chamber system

This project will determine if underground detention systems provide an equivalent level of service for stormwater treatment as stormwater management ponds. This will be achieved through water quality measurements collected from a StormTrap system and through the development of a pollutant-transfer model. The intern will work with both the Toronto Region Conservation Authority and Con Cast Pipe. Since the technology is relatively new, if it can be shown that the StormTrap system provides the same benefits as or exceeds the standards provided by stormwater management ponds then it is more likely to be the chosen solution ultimately leading to more manufacturing of pre-cast concrete products in Ontario. Municipalities benefit from this project by potentially having an alternative to stormwater management ponds.

A New Generation of Destratification Systems for Large Building Spaces

Thermal stratification is known as “the single biggest waste of energy in buildings today” during heating seasons in large building spaces, where hot air is trapped in the upper section whereas working zones are maintained colder in the lower causing excessive energy losses through ceilings and thermal comfort problems. Texas Electroniques Canada Inc. develops a new destratification system, DESTRATAIR, comprised of specially engineered fan mounted on walls/ columns to circulate air at an angle towards the upper section in a space achieving better mixing and thermal comfort when compared to conventional systems. This project aims to investigate the performance of the new system by a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for a designated retail store to provide a “verification/validation” study so the new system can be adopted by more clients of the company. A cost-effective solution will also be provided for the design of the new system based on a freely available CFD tool. This project will help the company maintain their technological lead in Canada and potentially explore to a bigger market of the DESTRATAIR system in North America.

Distributed and Partitioned Join Index

The overall goal of this internship is to improve the query capacity of the Informatica Data Vault data management system. In particular, better support for join operations, that combine the information of various tables of data warehousing appliactions, will be provided. For that, a specialized join index will be designed, developed and evaluated on standard data warehousing queries. The goal is to partition and distribute the index in order to be efficient in terms of storage requirement, query performance and manageability. The improved join performance within the Data Vault architecture will allow for better query performance scalability and predictability. These are crucial for Informatica to address new use cases and improve its capability to play an important role in the areas of Big Data and Internet data.

Consumer dynamics and product evaluation for the mobile game clandestine anomaly

In partnership with Zenfri Inc, this project seeks to facilitate the successful introduction of a mobile game called Clandestine Anomaly to the mobile game market. Due to the embryonic stage of the mobile game market this research will use primary and secondary research methods to create a market analysis and inform the market strategy. Firstly, this research will provide an understanding of the business environment by analyzing successful products and their marketing strategies along with industry trends and characteristics. Secondly, this research seeks to understand the psychological needs, goals and motivations of their potential market of consumers and thus, how to create perceived value. Third, this research will integrate the unique strengths and weaknesses of Zenfri Inc. into an appropriate strategy based on the insights of the primary and secondary research. The result will be an informed market position that is consistent with the value proposition, marketing messages and product design.

Intramucosal Lorazepam spray: Whole Cell and Extracellular Eelctrophysiological Study of Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics

Epileptic patients have a long term risk of recurrent seizures and the mainstay of treatment for controlling seizures is antiepileptic drugs. Management of epileptic emergencies usually requires hospitalization and the administration of intravenous (i.v.) anticonvulsant drugs. Lorazepam i.v. is the most effective treatment of status epilepticus, and therefore is routinely used in hospital emergency departments. Since most acute epileptic seizures start in a non-clinical setting, an effective, rapid, convenient and safe treatment, which does not require parenteral drug administration to abort seizure symptoms and signs and prevent emergencies, is highly desirable. A new oral spray formulation of Lorazepam, which is currently under investigation, has the potential to provide a fast, rapidly absorbed and efficient treatment of acute seizure symptoms and signs in both clinical and non-clinical settings. The main goal of this research is to study the effectiveness of Lorazepam oral spray in seizure termination using electrophysiological methods in animals.

Model for implementing and continuously improving the automated change management process for construction mega projects

Current communication means such as; Spreadsheet, the internet and Emails are not good enough when a change happens in a Billion $ oil and gas project where hundreds of technicians, engineers, managers, contractors from various disciplines in different locations are involved. The solution is an automated workflow process. Simply put, workflow is the step-by-step procedure taken to complete a job. An automated workflow is the one in which unnecessary time consuming human tasks is eliminated or changed as an automated machine-based task. This research aims to compare the old processes used for managing changes in construction mega projects with the automated process and also offer a model for the continuous improvement of the change management automated process

Development of Colour-Changing Indicator Label for Healthcare Applications

Lunanos Inc. and Ryerson University's School of Graphic Communications Management are seeking to collaborate on a six-month project to develop an innovative colour-changing indicator label that will be used in healthcare facilities to track the cleaning of various equipment and surfaces to reduce the frequency of healthcare-associated infections (HAI). In Canada, 1 in 10 patients admitted to a hospital picks up an infection and it is estimated that 30-50% of these cases are preventable through better infection prevention and control. In this project, Lunanos will be able to access Ryerson University's School of Graphic Communications Management's unique combination of expertise, experience, and equipment in modern printing, manufacturing, and post-processing methods in order to scale-up their production to produce labels with consistent characteristics needed for a planned field testing project.

Capacity Planning and Optimization of WiMAX for Smart Grid, Part 2

Smart grid (SG) aims at modernizing the current power grid which can better manage the electricity through the grid and react to the system faults quicker. To realize this goal, many sensors are attached to different points of the power grid infrastructure. These sensors collect data and can be used for controlling, protecting, and monitoring the status of the grid by receiving comands from the utility control center. Hence, a two-way communication infrastructure seen to be required for smart grid realization.

One of the Hydro companies intends to modernize their power grid and our task is to design a wireless infrastructure given the number of end-user devices and the system specifications. It is one of the potential solutions considered for smart grid implementation. My task is to simulate the network architecture based on one of the wireless technologies and optimize the system performance in terms of delay, reliability and capacity using a network simulator before the implementation.

Computer-assisted cardiac disease diagnosis system

With the advances of medical imaging, cardiac images have posed great challenges in processing and analysis due to the large amount of data generated. Dynamic Computer Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images, also referred to as 4D (3D+time) imaging, for example, have great capacity for screening, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of cardiac diseases. However, the tools to handle the image files are insufficient to best use the time of specialists such as radiologists and cardiologists. Patient scanning using gated cardiac MRI or CT sequences, for example, recorded from a complete cardiac cycle, contain 1500-5000 two dimensional images. Manual processing and analysis of this large number of images is extremely time consuming. Therefore, development of an intelligent system to facilitate diagnosis and clinical monitoring will greatly increase their productivity and could save lives during an emergency.

Novel application of deformable image registration using Computed Tomography for early diagnosis of lung parenchymal disease: focus on lung fibrosis

Otoscopy and Ophthalmology Training Technology Development

Teaching medical students and allied healthcare professionals accurate and patient friendly diagnosis of ear, eye and nasal conditions are challenging tasks due to the lack of realistic models and interaction with patients. The OONTTDP is a collaboration between the Hospital for Sick Children and Otosim to improve the teaching results through development of realistic simulators with various conditions embedded within an easy to use system. This development work includes: hardware design to incorporate 2-way communication for teaching feedback, modeling work to create ear, eye and nose models, and a novel virtual scope for diagnosing nasal conditions. This work offer hands-on technical training for new graduates while generating new products for Otosim.

The Characterization and Simulation of Futures Markets

Current financial models do an inadequate job of capturing the nuances of actual market movements and often exclude the characteristics that would differentiate the resulting data from randomly generated data. The project will identify the key market characteristics that encompass actual market movements by extending current pricing models to encompass those characteristics that are deemed to be important from the perspective of a market participant.