Innovative Projects Realized

Stream Erosion Control Assessment for Ontario Low Impact Development Stormwater Management

Urban development increases the runoff of precipitation to streams and rivers, degrading the environment in terms of water resources and habitat. While detention ponds can slow the water down and improve the water quality, larger volumes of water are still released to streams in most urban areas. New technologies in Low Impact Development (LID) provide innovative approaches to reduce the volume of water released from urban developments (e.g., infiltration). Erosion control is one criteria used to evaluate stormwater management strategies, but there is a need to adapt existing erosion assessment procedures given the recent shift from “peak-flow” to “runoff-volume” control measures. With a review of policy documents from other leading jurisdictions and of recent scientific literature, this research project will specifically provide updated stream erosion control critera for LID strategies concurrently with an update to Ontario’s storm water management guidelines byt the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

The Evolving Legal Services Research Project, Stage II

How can public legal education and information help Canadians get justice in our legal system? With the demand for publicly-funded or low-cost legal services far exceeding the supply, public legal education and information (PLEI) is filling an increasingly larger role in meeting the legal needs of people with modest means. Yet we know relatively little about how PLEI can help people deal with their legal problems. examines the effectiveness of PLEI in helping low- and modest-income people address their legal problems. The research, conducted at legal clinics, will look at PLEI provided at various points along the legal services continuum, with the goal of identifying when PLEI is effective on a primarily stand-alone or self-help basis and when a fuller continuum of legal services, including PLEI, is required. This research will provide Community Legal Education Ontario / Éducation juridique communautaire Ontario (CLEO) with insights into the effectiveness of PLEI in helping low- and modest-income people address their legal problems.

High Voltage Indicators and Warning Systems

Fatal personnel injury due to accidental contact with high voltage lines and equipment happens from time to time despite of substantial efforts put in place by industry to minimize the risk. The objective of the project is to identify effective concepts, techniques and solutions to reduce the risk of inadvertent contact with high voltage equipment for both Hydro workers and the general public. We will identify the most common scenarios of potential fatal encroachment based on the data obtained from BC Hydro. Then, we will conduct a comprehensive search for available commercial products and techniques, based on which new technologies or improvements to different parts of existing products will also be proposed to better fit the needs of BC Hydro. This research work will generate a report, covering available solutions to mitigate high voltage risk, assessment of the reliability, specificity, cost and expected performance for solutions and corresponding recommendations.

Monitoring and Control System Design for Catalyst Manufac!uring Unit

As one of the novel element of a new technology for enhanced recovery and upgrading directly in the reservoir of bitumen and heavy oils, the unit for the online and on-field manufacturing and delivery of nanocatalysts into the reservoir will be constructed during 2015. The specialized and uniquely designed compact device, currently referred to as CATSKID, is currently in the patenting process. Although it cannot be disclosed at the moment, the design is such that it allows the online production of nano-catalysts and will operate in remote areas with minimal maintenance and desirable remote monitoring and control. This MITACS application will develop the system for monitoring and control of the CATSKID unit from a Calgary location, allowing parameters adjustment and failure troubleshooting,

Leveraging Historical Development Data to Prioritize Software Testing Efforts

Ericsson Ottawa develops cellular base stations that are components of cellular networks marketed by Ericsson. The base stations serve as the interfaces between mobile devices (cell phones) to wired networks and the internet. These network products require high reliability and availability, which results in the need to perform extensive testing on expensive hardware, replicating complex customer network environments. Some tests are expensive, needing to be run for days, while others take seconds. Test failures have a high cost since they may stop the release process and require intervention by multiple engineers. Our goal is combine test prioritization with empirical software engineering to mine the historical artifacts including past code changes, bugs, peer reviews, and test runs to create statistical models to (1) prioritize tests and (2) help developers categorize and locate the cause of a failure. The outcomes of the project will increase the productivity of Ericsson Ottawa’s 1000 employees and advance the state-of-the-art in understanding what historical measures help in test prioritization and localization. Moreover, the proposed project will help train the HQPs involved on the state-of-the-art in mining software repository data, statistical modeling and software analytics; skills that are becoming increasingly important in our data-driven society.

Rich Recommendations

Item-to-item and user-to-item recommendations are prevalent on most ecommerce websites and digital content related mobile applications. At Kobo, we strive to constantly improve our recommendation system, which is based on co-purchase patterns on Kobo’s website or through Kobo eReaders and mobile apps. This internship is to explore improving the system along several dimensions: incorporating additional data sources, such as users’ ratings and reviews, and books that users have sideloaded onto devices (such as ePubs obtained from non-Kobo platforms); improving the core algorithm by introducing richer representations using deep learning; building recommendations for non-book, high-level concepts such as authors and series; building fine-grained recommendations based on subsets of the catalog to support personalization of item lists. All these explorations will be tested using A/B testing methodology, and expected results are determination of whether such ideas improve KPI metrics and full productization of the projects that lead to improvements in these KPIs.

Merging traditional and scientific knowledge in assessing wildlife health in relation to mining

As part of the environmental assessment of the prospective Blackwater Mine in British Columbia, New Gold mining company is implementing a ?Country Foods Monitoring Plan? to address concerns voiced by First Nations communities over the safety of traditional food sources in anticipation of new mine development and operations. The overall goal of my proposed work is to develop a culturally appropriate participatory wildlife health monitoring program that can be collaboratively implemented by mining companies, government and First Nation communities. It is the philosophy that this program will merge two ways of knowing about animal health. It will merge both scientific and traditional knowledge for the monitoring animal health. This project will help further develop New Gold?s Country Food?s Monitoring Plan. New Gold?s collaboration will not only fortify its position as a leader in progressive mining practices, but can also help to build better relationships between the mining industry and Aboriginal people.

Naturally acquired immunity against important bacterial pathogens in Bruce County First Nations communities

The goal of this proposal is to clarify the reasons for an increased burden of serious bacterial infections caused by two common pathogens: Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae in Canadian First Nations. Methodology includes comparative analysis of the critical parameters of naturally acquired immunity against these pathogens in adult First Nations individuals living in two different geographical areas with diverse environmental conditions (Southern Ontario versus Northwestern Ontario). As normal adults are expected to have immunity against common pathogens due to the natural expose to their antigenic compounds, a lack of immunity may indicate potential reason for an increased disease burden and provide important information for immunization policy as a preventive strategy. This work will contribute to building collaborative relationships between the industrial partner and local First Nations communities in Bruce County. Intern #1 will organize meetings with community leaders and membership and collect blood samples from 50 healthy First Nations adults from Southwestern Ontario and from 50 healthy First Nations adults from Northwestern Ontario by September 2015. The intern will perform laboratory testing of all collected serum samples with both ELISA and SBA, followed by statistical analysis of the data and will write a research manuscript.

Mathematical Models of cell invasion types emerging from phenotypic and environmental heterogene

The building blocks of multicellular organisms such as humans are cells, vessels and protein fibers. Cell migrations are instrumental in the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms (such as wound healing). Aberrant cellular migrations are important in many
pathological conditions, for instance in cancer. The majority of cancer related deaths (80-90%) are caused by spread of cancer cells to distant organs. This is called metastasis. The detailed mathematical modeling of cell invasions will allow us to better grasp the formation of
multicellular organisms as well as pathological situations such as cancer. In cancer a sophisticated mathematical model will enable us to target invasion with therapies. Model assisted therapies might enable us in the future to reduce metastatic loads in patients.

The development of olfaction in Sepia officinalis

As a complex species of mollusk, the common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, has a unique

physiology with multiple traits, such as their complicated brains that are similar to vertebrates.

With these similarities, S. officinalis provides a novel perspective for understanding olfaction.

Critical across the animal kingdom, olfaction allows for complex behaviors such as detection of

food, shelter, mates, and danger. Although arthropods and vertebrates are the archetypal

models of olfactory organization, since both systems are composed of basic functional units

called glomeruli, investigating the olfactory system in a cuttlefish provides new insights into the

evolution of olfactory mechanisms and information processing of complex metazoans. We

expect to find glomeruli, or glomerular-like structures, in S. officinalis through whole mount

immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization and we will identify the development and

differentiation of the embryonic cephalopod olfactory system.

Minimizing the Spread of Information in a Social Network by Blocking Links

Social network is becoming an increasingly popular media for information sharing. However, undesirable contents such as malicious rumors can spread through social networks among individuals. The technique to prevent undesirable content can also be applied in parenting control. As the more and more teenagers are using social network today, it is important to minimize the spread of undesirable contents into their ends. Thus, developing effective strategies for preventing the spread of undesirable spreading in a social network is an important research issue. This research is trying to design a new model to control the spread of contamination that is not proposed by previous works. The expected outcome of this research is to come up with a research paper that presents new models and algorithms for minimizing undesirable content’s propagation in a social network.

Spatial pattern of wildlife habitat across heterogeneous landscapes in Atlantic rainforest near São Paulo, Brazil

Transitions between adjacent plant communities are important features of landscapes that might harbour greater diversity. However, forest edges created by human activities can have negative consequences for wildlife habitat. Both types of transitions dominate fragmented agricultural landscapes in tropical forests. Understanding the vegetation structure in such heterogeneous landscape could help predict animal movements across natural and anthropogenic transitions. This project compares the relationship between structural diversity and bird movement across different types of landscape transitions as part of a larger joint study on animal movement in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. The objectives are to determine the relationship between structural diversity and frugivorous bird assemblages and to compare seed distribution across forest edges and landscape transitions with different structure. The outcomes include an assessment of the usefulness of structural diversity as an indicator for wildlife habitat, which will be included
in the multidisciplinary research program on animal movement in Brazil’s forests.