Innovations Realized

Social Influence and performance in a simulated clinical scenario and evaluation of the validity of simulation for team training

The complexity of modern healthcare requires teams of professionals to work together to identify gaps in care. Failures of the healthcare team mean that patient safety and healthcare outcomes are compromised. This series of studies will explore how cognitive load and stress influence obedience to authority, team performance and ultimately patient safety. The outcomes will be used to better prepare healthcare teams to protect the patient against human factors that hinder teams addressing behaviours and decisions that hinder patient safety.

Machine Learning for Increasing the Speed and Quality of Service in Online Medical Services

Telehealth/Telemedicine covers a variety of medical services offered through media such as telephone, email and the internet. As technology evolves, these online medical services can be further enhanced to improve the user experience. In this project, we aim to focus on a particular set-up where the patients interact with doctors over a chat service. The chat service employs a number of doctors with varying specialties, and at any time during a doctor’s work hour, he/she might interact with up to five patients concurrently. Accordingly, it would be essential to improve the flow of information between doctors and the patients. We aim to employ natural language processing and machine learning based approaches to improve the user experience in chat services. Further, we plan to investigate time series prediction methods for predicting the volume of patients requesting chat services over a given period of time.

Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion of Source-Separated Organics and Municipal Sludges to Produce Renewable Bioenergy

A significant fraction of wet organic waste streams within typical municipalities include food wastes (collected by many as source separated organics), and sludges or biosolids. In Canada, such wastes are mostly going to landfill or being land applied to recover some nutrient value. Anaerobic digestion (AD) for disposal of organic waste is an attractive option to recover renewable bioenergy (as methane or hydrogen), with additional environmental benefits from preventing such wastes from going to the landfill. However, time needed to recover bioenergy conventional AD technology is large, which increases capital costs, making it uneconomical for most municipalities to recover this bioenergy. Greenfield has developed a high-rate AD (GHRAD) technology expected to reduce the time needed, and thus improve the economics of bioenergy recovery. This project will help improve and optimize the recovery of bioenergy from municipal source separated organics and municipal sludges using GHRAD technology, established at pilot-scale by Greenfield.

Designing and developing a real-time medical data transfer system for space health usage

In recent years there has been a rapid increase in companies providing rocket launch services for private space travel (SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic to name a few). Access to space by private citizens means that companies will need to collect health information from the private astronauts as well monitor their health while in space. This information will have to be transmitted from space to the ground in a secure manner so that individual health information remains private. Mission Control Space Services (Mission Control) is a company which specializes in the transmission of data from remote sources using satellites. The intern is in the Aerospace Physiology Laboratory which conducts research in astronaut health and will have a demonstration CubeSat orbiting the earth in 2021. They will use their combined information construct a communication system that will be used to transmit secure health data to and from orbit.

Online economic tool to quantify the health benefits of municipal investments in urban greenspaces

7.2. Public Project Overview:
The project will develop an online tool to quantify the economic return on investment resulting from improvements in public health attributed to investments in urban greenspaces. The tool will focus on three pathways: improvements in physical health, improvements in mental health and health benefits associated with improved climate resiliency. The tool will provide provincial, municipal and community organizations a mechanism to support informed program, policy and planning decisions and will help users better understand and communicate the value of greenspace investments.

Described Video and Language Detection on Audio-tracks Using Machine Learning

Bell Media receives content from different providers, including content it produces in-house. There are standards for tagging audio tracks with metadata however many facilities (including Bell) do not adhere to these standards. Currently Bell uses a manual approach to classify unlabeled audio tracks, which is inefficient, and time consuming for massive digital media that Bell has and receives. Bell is developing a single ingest pipeline to accelerate the labeling and processing of media files it receives. This research project will look at two features that Bell Media would like to include in the ingest pipeline. The first feature is the ability to automatically classify the audio track of the media file into its language type, primarily English or French. The second feature is to identify which audio track carries the described video information. In this research we will develop machine learning solutions for these two problems.

Quantum Key Infrastructure

The research described in this project proposes a very realistic and Quantum Computing resilient key distribution networking protocol to enable highly secure and efficient information flow. On one hand, the protocol provides unconditional one-time-pad based encryption; on the other hand, it is based on information-theoretic concepts that can be cost-effectively implemented today to establish Quantum Key Infrastructure (QKI) that somewhat resembles already existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The PKI to a large extent could be used to enable QKI. The protocol is of high relevance given the threat that quantum computers can pose on present and future IT infrastructures.

Optimal and heuristic optimization methods for large-scale naval refit operations

This project deals with the development of new mathematical models and solution methods to optimize naval surface ship refit operations. The Naval Surface Ship Work Period Problem (NSWPP) is a highly complex resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with many work orders that are equivalent to small projects. Planning, scheduling, and executing NSWPPs are very challenging, and a large volume of planned and scheduled work is typically never achieved for a variety of reasons such as unexpected discovery of damages, high variability in work scope and duration, unavailability of human resources or equipment, logistical delays. The goal of NSWPP is to complete all important and critical activities within the time-window available, where uncompleted activities will not compromise the mission or can be reasonably mitigated. This project will propose new models to deal with the optimization of the NSWPP and incorporate time-quality, capacity-cost, cost-risk trade-offs. Heuristic solution methods will also be developed.

Prevalence of mental health disorders among public safety communicators; Preparedness for COVID-19 and its impact

Public safety personnel (PSP; e.g., police officers, firefighters, paramedics, 911 communications) work to keep the Canadian public healthy and safe. Yet, as part of their jobs, PSP experience events that can be traumatic, making it more likely that PSP will develop mental health disorders compared to general people. Public safety communicators (e.g., 911, police, fire, and ambulance call-takers) generally do not receive the same recognition as traditional front-line PSP though, even though communicators have significant rates of mental health disorders that are comparable to other PSP. Unfortunately, even if researchers want to work with communicators to understand and respond to their needs, currently, a list public-safety answering points (PSAPs; i.e., call centres) does not exist. Without a list, there is no real way for researchers to contact PSAPs or even understand how many PSAPs exist and how many individuals work or volunteer as communicators. Without a list of Canadian PSAPs, both researchers and individual PSAPs cannot conduct research or share experiences (like policies and procedures) that may help other Canadian PSAPs, and cannot share experiences that may prevent harm or injury.

AI for delivering product recommendation in retail consumer categories

E-commerce has evolved rapidly in recent decades resulted from globalization and international trade. The demand of online shopping is increasing every day, which has opened business opportunities to attract more costumers locally and globally. However, achieving satisfactory user experience in online shopping remains challenging compared to in-person walk-in shopping. Currently, customers have to input static text and images, or use webcam. Engaging interaction and automatic products recommendation is missing. In this project, we use eyeglasses as a use case to demonstrate how an AI-driven recommendation system can be designed and implemented for retail consumer categories. We will integrate image processing, computer vision and machine learning techniques to address the current issues of poor product recommendations. We will also create a basic deployment interface, enabling the trained model to integrate easily into a production environment.

Toward Net Zero Transportation: Environmental benefits of Hydrogen-fuelled Trucks

Hydra Energy Corporation Commercial Demonstration Project based in Prince George, British Columbia 12.4 MT/day of waste hydrogen will be captured, purified and transported to an onsite hydrogen refueling station from which Class 8 tractor-trailer truck fleets will refuel daily. Hydra’s demonstration project can provide a significant reduction in fleet greenhouse gas(GHG) emissions, Particulate Matter and other air emissions.

The R&D project results will advance the scientific knowledge of hydrogen in internal combustion engines, support the granting of a third party verification/certification of the environmental benefits of Hydra’s technology, and will help to expand the availability of clean energy transportation technologies in and beyond B.C.

Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO); A novel technique for gold recovery from mercury-contaminated tailings from artisanal and small-scale gold mining

The proposed research aims to optimize the use of DMSO as a lixiviant in gold recovery. To date, mercury and cyanide are the popular lixiviants used in the gold processing industry. These chemicals are harmful to both the environment and humans, and have been the major concern in gold mining. The proposed lixiviant, DMSO, is an FDA approved chemical that is cheap and environment friendly. The successful use of DMSO in gold mining is beneficial to the gold mining industry.

Upon the successful use of DMSO for gold leaching, Newlox Gold Ventures Corp, being the partner organization for the study, will have the opportunity to pilot the use of DMSO in gold leaching. The company also has the advantage of promoting the technique to other miners in the industry, as well as establish collaborations with local and national governments.