Applied Research Province: Ontario

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The unbreakable stone age

The ancient Japanese vase had survived much in its 6,000 years — but withstanding researchers’ probing hands was probably asking too much. That led its owner to Mohawk College with a question: could the college produce an exact replica of the neolithic pottery on a 3D printer in its Additive Manufacturing Resource Centre?

Mohawk saw an opportunity in the project beyond the straightforward challenge of creating a 3D printed reproduction of a neolithic vase from Japan’s “Jomon” period. It was also a chance to develop and refine the potential of additive manufacturing as a tool for historical preservation.

To do that, they established a scanning process that used a high-resolution, hospital-grade Siemens CT scanner and researched a way to capture and combine the scanned data so that they could be converted into a workable format for printing. The final result is a reproduction vase made of Nylon 12 that captures all the intricate details of a clay artifact. While the original must be displayed behind glass, its new twin can now be touched and handled without concern.

“It’s very exciting to see advanced healthcare and advanced manufacturing technology being combined for a new and unique application such as archeological study,” said Jim Graziadei, managing director of Siemens Healthcare Canada. “We are honoured to have been a part of it.”

The project took approximately four months and two Mohawk College co-op students worked on it, spending their time manipulating the data and preparing the new file to be built on Mohawk’s Selective Laser Sintering machine. The pair can now say they worked on a world-first — in combining a healthcare tool with additive manufacturing.

The process developed for this project will provide a framework the Additive Manufacturing Resource Centre can use for future applied research projects. It could also be shared with companies doing 3D Printing commercially. The project also validated the high level of detail that can be achieved with 3D-printed.

Industry: Manufacturing
Funded by: Canada Foundation for Innovation

About Mohawk College

Mohawk College educates and serves 30,000 full-time, part-time and apprenticeship students at three campuses in Hamilton, Ontario. More than 1,200 international students from over 70... Learn more
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Chopping chopper waste

Airbus Helicopters Canada came to Niagara College seeking help to improve the productivity of a workstation in its Fort Erie plant. The company had established that the station (which trimmed, drilled and routed carbon fibre parts) was a bottleneck in the manufacturing process and was also wasting too much material. Airbus hoped a partnership with Niagara College would help improve the function of the station by reducing scrap and increasing its rate of production.

The research team, made up of an engineering instructor and a student on his senior co-op placement, used a GoPro camera to film workers at the station. They then fed the data they gathered into a program that rated activities as value-added or not. Among other things, the time-study data showed employees were wasting hours looking for tools: to fix that, the team built a mobile rack, with places for every tool.

The same data was used to study ideal trimming and drilling times and create standard operating procedures that would allow employees to achieve them. Scott Hickey, senior manager of manufacturing at the plant, said the research allowed the company to make more accurate and competitive quotes.

The most significant change brought about by the project, however, was the decision to buy a machine from a local company that automates the cutting and drilling of composite materials, which allows the work cell to increase quality and generate higher profits. The project, which ran over six months, let student Alex Goerz learn new skills not taught in the classroom, including recording and analyzing data.

“The wonderful partnership with Niagara College on this program has been amazing,” Hickey said. “It gives the student the ability to come into the work force, to really understand what we need, but also, for us it gives an opportunity to perceive what new technologies are out there.”

The report submitted to the company by the research team documented several tangible improvements, including:

  • A two-year return on investment on the $304,000 spent to automate the process;
  • Increased productivity and quality;
  • 8,911 working hours annually reduced to approximately 1,500
  • An estimated 85 per cent reduction in waste, from $180,000 to $20,000
Industry: Manufacturing

About Niagara College

Established in 1967, Niagara College has grown to become a leading global college and one of Canada’s most enterprising postsecondary institutions. With a mission to... Learn more
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Aqua Greens – From Seed to Restaurant

In a contest of whether Humber College or fish were more important in the success of Aqua Greens, a company that supplies organic greens to restaurants and markets in Toronto, the fish would probably win. But Humber would be a close second.

Tilapia are an essential part of the aquaponics system that Aqua Greens uses to supply restaurants and grocery stores in Toronto with several varieties of basil, as well as dandelions and mustard greens. Aquaponics is a water-based growing method that requires no soil: instead, the plant roots are bathed in highly oxygenated water that draws its nutrients from the waste generated by the fish living in tanks in another part of the system.

As the water is pumped from the fish tanks to the tanks that feed the plants, the ammonia in it is converted to nitrate fertilizer. In turn, as the plants draw on the water, they filter and clean it before it is returned to the fish, in what is called a re-circulating, closed loop ecosystem. A full 90 per cent of the water is recycled.

Aquaponics can significantly reduce the ecological footprint of growing food. Aqua Greens’s indoor aquaponic system conserves land, reduces the distance food travels and uses no pesticides, herbicides or added fertilizers.

Where does Humber come into this? The founders of Aqua Greens, Pablo Alvarez and Craig Petten, are graduates of Humber. Both were working as waiters when they decided they wanted to do something more with their lives. Both enrolled in Humber’s Sustainable Energy and Building Technology program. They did their final project together, on aquaponics — seeing an opportunity to combine their passion for sustainability with their love of good food.

But the company has another tie to Humber: Aqua Greens received funding from the Humber New Ventures Seed Fund and later won the Humber Launch Pad Entrepreneur Award, which led to more than $30,000 in funding as well as giving access to mentors, business plans and business coaches.

Partner(s): Aquagreens
Funded by: Humber College

About Humber Polytechnic

Humber Polytechnic is one of Canada’s leading postsecondary institutions, combining deep theoretical learning with applied, hands-on experience. Humber offers a wide variety of credentials including... Learn more
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3D Asset Modification – Animated Character Brought to Life

Humber worked with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) to create models, animations, and environments that demonstrate AMD’s proprietary technology. Working with AMD, a team of 3D Animation, Art and Design students not only refined a character model, “Rat Boy,” the company had created, but also created an entire subway environment to display the character, and animated the character in order to show off AMD’s TressFX technology, which gives realistic hair and fur movement to video game characters.

Working to a tight deadline, the team of students from the 3D Animation, Art and Design program delivered work that was of higher quality than AMD had expected. The students were tasked to further refine the character (Rat Boy) that AMD had already created, develop a subway environment to display the character, and animate the character in a way that shows off AMD’s TressFX tech, which gives video game characters more realistic hair/fur movement. The final outcome was a TressFX technology demo, which the company showed this year at GDC 2017, the largest annual gathering of professional game developers. The company also plans to publish the student work on GPUOpen. Ryan Mayne, a 3D Game Developing Technician at AMD, is a Humber alumni from the 3D Animation, Art & Design program, and worked with the Humber talent to help fully flesh out this character.

The students expressed their interest in the project and gaining hands-on experience in the 3D Animation industry, understanding how to develop a project from the beginning, planning stages to final deliverable at the standard that is realistic in the industry, rather than just a hypothetical situation in a classroom setting.

The students’ eagerness to learn stood out to Sean Skelton, who does research and development for AMD. He was impressed by their enthusiasm. “They really stepped up to the plate and worked really hard to get what needed to be done, done,” Skelton said. “They went above and beyond what was required of them.”

“They got to know a bit about how the workflow is, and the pipeline of creating the final project deliverable and bringing it in, getting feedback,” said Ryan Mayne, a 3D game developing technician for AMD and graduate of Humber. “They delivered on the finished character as promised. It was the quality we expected – actually better quality than we expected.”

Skelton was happy with the scene and the animations as a final result, as the character was brought to life in a way that exceeded expectations. “We enjoyed the collaboration that we had, and we look forward to pursuing further collaboration with Humber,” Skelton said.

Funded by: Humber College, Ignite

About Humber Polytechnic

Humber Polytechnic is one of Canada’s leading postsecondary institutions, combining deep theoretical learning with applied, hands-on experience. Humber offers a wide variety of credentials including... Learn more
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Integrating kosher and food-safety guidelines

While there is much overlap between kosher and food safety programs, they have been kept markedly separate. Until now — thanks to the Kashruth Council of Canada and Niagara College’s joint project to develop an efficient way to integrate kosher certification with food safety planning.

The council, a not-for-profit organization, is Canada’s largest certifier of kosher food. Its inspectors are responsible for determining that products made at more than 1,000 facilities across Canada and around the world meet the standards of Jewish dietary laws.

At the same time, most of the world’s leading food retailers and manufacturers participate in the Global Food Safety Initiative, which was created to set international standards for food safety. Ensuring compliance with the initiative’s standards is overseen by the British Retail Consortium and the Safe Quality Food Program, among others.

The Kashruth Council believed integrating kosher standards with the safety requirements already in the guideline documents of those two organizations would simplify business for thousands of companies that want to meet both food safety and kosher standards. (More than 40 per cent of packaged food products sold in the United States are kosher certified, according to market research firm Mintel).

One faculty member and several students from Niagara College’s Canadian Food and Wine Institute Innovation Centre worked for six months with the Council to lay out exactly where kosher certification requirements should be included in the safety documents so companies would only have to check one source to review safety and kosher requirements.

In most cases, adding a few words to a safety standard was all that was required. This safety requirement from the British Retail Consortium: “The site shall have a demonstrable meeting program which enables food safety, legality and quality issues to be brought to the attention of senior management at least monthly and allows for the resolution of issues requiring immediate action,” only needed the word “kosher” added before “quality” and “kosher certifier” added after “senior management,” to combine the two standards.

Amended guides for both the British Retail Consortium and the Safe Quality Food Program have already been published. “We are always looking for ways to make kosher certification more efficient and effective for our kosher certified companies, and we are hopeful that this project will do just that,” says Rabbi Sholom H. Adler, the Kasruth council’s director of Industrial Kosher.

Industry: Food

About Niagara College

Established in 1967, Niagara College has grown to become a leading global college and one of Canada’s most enterprising postsecondary institutions. With a mission to... Learn more
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An animated conversation — with no words

The global marketplace presents many challenges to Canadian companies. How, for example, do you boil complex molecular science down for the layman — without using any words? The sales and marketing team at CSL Silicones Inc., a Guelph-based manufacturer of silicone coatings, lubricants, compounds and adhesives, used presentations with two-dimensional images to demonstrate how the coating functions — a fairly standard approach.

But the company needed to find a way to communicate with a global audience —regardless of language or technical expertise. It wanted explanations that transcended language, designed for visual learners. They brought that challenge to a research team at George Brown College’s Centre for Arts and Design.

A team of students from the game development program was set to work developing an animation that would capture the complex science behind CSL’s products in a visual presentation easy for anyone—layman or expert—to understand.

The first animation focused on the flagship coating, Si-COAT® 570™ High Voltage Insulator Coating, which protects insulators from damage caused by weather, moisture and pollutants. The students worked in two groups, one focused on designing graphics and the other on developing animation, parsing out the exact science behind the product and how to explain that in a simplified, visual way.

Three game development students— Xuan Zhang, Megan Mattes and Thuc Phuong Lu—and one George Brown graduate, 3D artist Emanuel Melo, worked on the animation. They were supervised by the principal investigator, Billy Matjiunis (a game development professor) and Alexis Rodziewicz, the project manager.

The team at CSL Silicones is looking forward to doing further animations across multiple products and market projects, and anticipates this innovative approach could change the way they promote and sell all their products.

“In approximately 2½ minutes, you get a seamless story of the product value proposition, a visualization of the science, its application and supporting benefits. It takes our team about 3½ hours to do the same thing to a roomful of people,” said Rae Townsend, vice-president of strategic business initiatives at CSL. “What this animation allows us to do is grow from serving a global English-speaking audience of 350 million people, to an audience of over 6 billion people overnight.”

Partner(s): CSL Silicones
Funded by: College and Community Innovation Program, NSERC

About George Brown Polytechnic

George Brown strives to build a seamless bridge between learners and employment by developing dynamic programs that are informed by industry and workplace-ready graduates who... Learn more
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Harnessing Fun for Children with Disabilities

It sounds like a dream come true for kids everywhere — your parents want you to play your video game. It’s good for you.

Perhaps more surprising is the reason these video games are likely to get parental endorsement — they are designed to get children with cerebral palsy doing their physiotherapy exercises.

“We are trying to make cod liver oil more palatable,” Denis Nikitenko joked in an interview. He puts equal emphasis, however, on the other goal he and his partners have in developing the games: improving quality of life for children with cerebral palsy by giving them something they can play with others. “We’re focused on social as well as physical benefits,” Nikitenko said. “They [the children] don’t interact with peers much, they don’t see friends much.” (One survey found 53 per cent of children with disabilities have no close friends).

The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, through its Community and College Social Innovation Fund. It is a partnership between Sheridan College, where Nikitenko is a professor and coordinator of the mobile computing program, and the Possibility Engineering and Research Lab at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Centre, which serves children with disabilities.

The partners began working together in 2014, when a student chose to make a game for Holland Bloorview as his graduating year project. The idea of using video games to benefit children with disabilities is not new, but those designed for broader markets are often not suitable, and those devised by therapists tend to lack the design and game features that make video games so engaging and engrossing. “If it’s not fun, they won’t play,” Nikitenko said.

The partners are developing games to be played on the Microsoft Kinect, a device operated by motion sensors, where users control the game they are playing by gestures. Each game will have to be tailored for the specific physical and mental abilities of the child using it, and calibrated to suit his or her range of motion and therapy needs. “Each participant will be at the limits of what they can do and pushed to do a little more,” Nikitenko said.

The project will move through several stages, starting with assessing needs and then testing simplified, single-person versions of games with children at the hospital, followed by multiplayer versions. Strict privacy controls on who can work with Holland Bloorview’s patients mean the designers will depend on feedback relayed by hospital staff. The same concerns will keep the games offline for now. There is also that traditional issue of parental approval: the designers will not be creating games featuring fire-bombing dragons or anything else scary or violent. Some will reward cooperation, some will feature magical abilities, perhaps turning an opponent’s online character into something goofy.

The children will not be the only subjects of study, however. At two points, the students working on the project will be assessed to see how their understanding of users with special needs is affected by building games for them.

About Sheridan College

Sheridan College is one of Canada’s leading postsecondary institutions, serving over 23,000 full time students at four campuses in the western Greater Toronto Area. We... Learn more
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Connecting Ideas in a Time of Transformation

Introducing all-day kindergarten was just a part of a massive transformation in early learning and child care in Ontario. From provincial governance to curriculum details to work relationships, everything is changing.

Researchers at Conestoga College in Waterloo are working with the Region of Waterloo Children’s Services Division to help make sense of those changes for stakeholders in the region — all the educators, planners and administrators who contribute to different aspects of care and education for very young children.

“They are being asked to embrace a pedagogy that is much more emergent, much more process-oriented,” said Goranka Vukelich, director of Ideas Connect, a Community and College Social Innovation Fund project, established by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

“Even the name of the new curriculum framework is a question, ‘How does learning happen?’” Vukelich observed. “They are being asked to embrace a pedagogy of possibilities.”

The focus of early learning, in other words, is shifting from what children learn to how they learn, with the understanding that laying down good processes of learning now will serve children throughout their school years and all through life. Content is just a vehicle to what’s really important, learning itself.

The change in philosophy is accompanied by other changes, too. A different ministry is responsible; accountability systems have changed, as has legislation and regulation for licensed child care providers. Instruction in all-day kindergarten is done by teams of early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers.

Conestoga College and the Region of Waterloo’s Children’s Services have worked together for more than five years, including creating the Early Childhood Education Professional Resource Centre on the Conestoga campus. Applying for the Social Innovation grant as a partnership allows students on work placements in community services to consult with experts at the college on issues related to the changing early childhood landscape. They get experience in planning and adapting to change, and Waterloo organizations get the benefit of research and guidance from the college.

“The students in the classroom are learning the latest research. They get to take that unique lens into the workplace, with the luxury to sit back and focus those ideas on real projects they can participate in,” Vukelich said.

The key to success, Vukelich believes, is their choice of project lead — a person who already knows the area and the issues, and could visit planning committees and identify problems for students and researchers to tackle before students went on the job. That informed head start will make all the difference, she said.

Three of Conestoga’s degree programs will be involved in the project: Bachelor of Early Learning and Program Development, Bachelor of Criminal and Community Justice and Bachelor of Applied Health Information Science. Projects they work on could be handbooks for meeting regulations, or computer programs for tracking professional development.

“This is a really interesting way of bringing new ideas and realities into the academic curriculum and having it extend into the community as we share research and ideas,” Vukelich said.

About Conestoga College

Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning is a leader in polytechnic education and one of Ontario’s fastest growing colleges, delivering a full range... Learn more
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Support and Guidance, Sight Unseen

The transition from high school to university is a tough one for most students, and young people with disabilities face particular challenges. To help ease them into their new world, researchers at George Brown College in Toronto are developing an online network with e-mentoring.

The Postsecondary Students with Disabilities Network (PSDNet) is intended as one way to help counter the historic failure of the education system, institutions and governments to support students with disabilities, explained Charles Anyinam, professor at George Brown College’s Faculty of Community Services and Health Sciences.

He is the lead researcher on PSDNet, a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Community and College Social Innovation Fund. Over three years, Anyinam and a team of partners and students at George Brown will work to set up a mentoring system designed to help students with disabilities thrive at school.

It can be a struggle for them. In Ontario, students with disabilities are less likely to finish high school than those without disabilities (18.7 percent don’t finish, compared to 12.5 percent of able-bodied peers). Twice as many Ontarians without disabilities have degrees as those with disabilities. That attrition may be due, in part, to being isolated from peers and role models — which is why the focus is online mentoring. Anyinam doesn’t want any student with disabilities in Ontario to feel left out.

“When it’s done well, e-mentoring is just as effective, but the cost of e-mentoring is much less,” Anyinam said in an interview. It also removes the considerable barrier of travel from the equation. “If I am a mentor in Thunder Bay, I can still mentor someone at George Brown…we want to make sure as we are building this platform that it will extend all across Ontario — and my dream is, all across Canada. Being web-based keeps costs down but connects more people.”

Because many participants in PSDNet will be underage and potentially vulnerable, several safety precautions are being built in.  Mentors will have to go through police background checks. Online forums will be monitored for bullying or other problems. Mentor-mentee “discussions” will initially be through text messages, and participants will be encouraged to keep it that way, to ensure safety for the mentee and to help mentors feel secure in their role. Ultimately, however, whether to meet will be their decision.

Mentors and mentees will be matched based on three main criteria, Anyinam says. First is gender, because it is a big factor in university life and careers, particularly in sciences and engineer and research shows mentoring for women is best done by women. A shared area of study is also important. Finally, the nature of the disability will be considered, though it is not the most important consideration.

Students from George Brown and its partner schools in the project, Nipissing University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology will be hired for two teams working on the project — one designing the visual interface and one developing the technical software side people don’t see.

About George Brown Polytechnic

George Brown strives to build a seamless bridge between learners and employment by developing dynamic programs that are informed by industry and workplace-ready graduates who... Learn more
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Leaving Trauma Behind for a Brighter Future

In recent years, Canada has welcomed thousands of people seeking asylum, many of them survivors of war and torture. They come for the chance of a new life — but the shadows of the old one can block them from the best paths to a new one, education.

The after-effects of living through war and violence are a daily reality for refugees and asylum seekers. Their schooling may have been interrupted by war, or date from makeshift schools in refugee camps. Survivors may also experience after effects that diminish their ability to study, including memory and concentration problems, anxiety, insomnia and chronic pain.

Yet education remains their best chance at a successful life in their new country.

Jaswant Kaur Bajwa, a professor and research coordinator at the George Brown College’s Centre for Preparatory and Liberal Studies, is leading a project to help victims of torture and violence get access to post-secondary education. The project is a Community and College Social Innovation Fund grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

As things became more chaotic in Syria, Bajwa said, staff at George Brown began discussing how the college could accommodate refugees. Research shows refugees are less likely to pursue post-secondary education than other new Canadians and more likely to be unemployed or underemployed and earn less.

“The question was, what would happen to these folks when they came to school? Do we need to do things differently? Are there things the system needs to do differently?” Bajwa said in an interview. “Education is a really important determinant of whether they can move from the fringes to the centre of society.”

It is not just young refugees who need educations. Many well-educated refugees have left behind careers and need Canadian credentials to start again.

George Brown has partnered with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on the project. The two-year program has three phases. It will start with interviews and focus groups with refugees on what they expect from education, and the barriers they perceive to attaining it.

The next step is to use information from the interviews to adapt the curriculum for George Brown’s Transitions to Post-Secondary Education program to the needs of refugees. The Transitions program helps people with mental illnesses re-enter higher education. It teaches life skills, academic upgrading, career development and English courses. They will be tailored to refugee needs.

The final phase will be to introduce the new programs in two four-month terms, or in short-term workshops and seminars, depending on the themes. Follow up will include gathering feedback from participants and instructors and other evaluation.

Bajwa wants the courses to give refugees something more than the tangible benefit of education — hope. “Focusing on the here and now and the future is good for their well-being,” she said. “Evidence shows refugees do better when they look forward, not back.”

About George Brown Polytechnic

George Brown strives to build a seamless bridge between learners and employment by developing dynamic programs that are informed by industry and workplace-ready graduates who... Learn more