Projects

Environmental Instruments Canada

Residential radon progeny exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer, after smoking. The two main radon isotopes are Rn-222, which is part of the uranium-238 decay chain, and Rn-220, also called thoron, which is part of the thorium-232 decay chain. There is currently much interest in the Rn-220 contribution to radon progeny exposure, which has so far been largely ignored. (Rn-220 has a relatively short half life and usually decays before it reaches the living areas in a house and it usually doesn’t show up in radon measurements. But, Rn-220 has a longer lived decay product which does reach living areas and contributes to radon progeny exposure. It can even exceed the Rn-222 contribution.)

Environmental Instruments Canada (EIC) produces a Radon Sniffer (see https://radonsniffer.com/ ), which is used by radon mitigators and building scientists to find radon entry points. These sniffers currently assume all radon is Rn-222. See the appendix for a more detailed description of how the sniffer works. We want to extend the functionality to Rn-220.

In a 2020 M2PI project, we came up with a dedicated sampling and counting sequence and developed the math to determine how much Rn-222 vs Rn-220 was in the air. This report is available to the team.

In this project, we wish to develop a method by which we can determine the presence of Rn-220 in the air, while the Radon Sniffer is continually sampling air and without having to run a dedicated thoron measurement sequence.

Environmental Instruments Canada
IOTO
Principal Component Analysis (PCA), as well as Factor Analysis, are a couple of techniques used to increase data value by making data more interpretable while simultaneously preserving as much variability and information possible . Given large topic-indexed datasets reflecting activity by parliamentarians such as chamber interventions, committee interventions, bills, motions, and chamber votes how might such analytical techniques be used to reduce the dimensionality of these sets while increasing their interpretability? Can useful and efficient graphical displays for the public be generated through the application of such techniques to political data? What other types of data analysis methods may be used alongside such techniques to extract meaning from political data? What measures of similitude or difference between individual politicians or parties might be derived? How might such features help to measure political performance? How can topic indexes be aggregated to reflect similarities in political concern?
NOVION

Background

The stormwater infrastructure in many cities is facing challenges as the climate changes, rainfall patterns change and sea levels rise. To meet these challenges, cities are installing green infrastructure (GI) systems to absorb and retain rainfall where it lands and reduce sewer overflow. Across North America alone, cities are investing over $56.2 billion dollars in green infrastructure. By doing so, communities are becoming more resilient against climate change and are achieving environmental, social and economic benefits. Novion’s Climate Intelligence Platform helps cities monitor their green infrastructure for performance optimization, regulatory compliance, and maintenance.

Problem Statement

Once green infrastructure has been constructed, monitoring the changes in water level after a rainfall event is required to verify its performance and net impact. This project will investigate aspects of this monitoring.

NOVION
NRCAN

Long-distance dispersal of insects in fast moving air currents is increasingly recognized as an important driver of their dynamics at a landscape scale. Moreover, this type of dispersal has important implications for forest and agricultural crops impacted by insects. Because the detection and tracking of populations of flying insects remains challenging, it is rarely possible to determine where insects originated after they have dispersed long distances. Data from weather radars designed to detect precipitation may be useful tools for gaining insight into insect long distance dispersal because insect bodies and rain drops are often similar in size. Thus, within radar scans there is potential to quantify the density of insects departing to start long-distance dispersal as well as the movement trajectories of swarms–at least until they pass beyond the range of the radar. However, because Doppler weather radars are extremely sensitive and capable of detecting water vapor in clouds, it can be difficult to distinguish between potential insect signals and weather signals even when it is not ostensibly raining.

This project has two distinct objectives. First, we will investigate classification of radar images, based on motion, to identify insect swarms. Second, we will develop a mathematical model and numerical simulations to more easily distinguish distinguish meteorological and biotic signals.

Perfit

Perfit is currently working on a virtual fitting room app that allows online shoppers to get a virtual preview of the fit of garments in their cart. The virtual fit is accomplished via simulations of cloth interacting with a customer avatar through particle collisions. Specifically, each piece of cloth is modeled using a mesh of interconnected particles. The company has made progress on collisions between cloth and avatar. However, there is a need for collisions between cloth and cloth that has remained a significant challenge for the company. For example, the capability for a virtual garment to interact with itself via cloth-on-cloth collision would allow improved wrinkle quality, and garments with pleats, such as a pleated skirt. The technical challenge facing the company is to enable the handling of cloth-on-cloth collisions in near real time. In a mathematical sense, an algorithm for cloth-on-cloth collisions would need to be developed that minimizes the number of operations required (e.g., avoids brute force particle searches) while maintaining sufficient accuracy.

Topics in geometry, physics, computational methods, and computer graphics are expected to arise while working on this problem. The preferred implementation of the solution is the Fortran programming language in order to facilitate integration with the existing physics engine. During the workshop, meshes for both customer avatar and cloth will be made available through GitHub for testing.

CSTS Healthcare
Cancer is a disease that affects 14M people each year. While we have had some success with specific cancers, many patients are put on a roller coaster of emotion through cycles of remission and relapse. There is abundant scientific evidence which tells us cancer is driven by multiple genes working in concert. CSTS Healthcare has developed a computational system which identifies personalized cancer therapy for every cancer patient given their unique set of DNA and RNA. In practice, the therapy a patient actually receives may not exactly match what our system has identified as the best therapy. In this project we will develop therapy similarity measures to allow us to compare our therapies with those actually given by to a patient by their oncologists.
IOTO International
Performance metrics in sports have seen remarkable growth and development. What if we turned some of these mathematical tools on political performance? Building on last year’s M2PI project, the goal of this year’s project is to analyze data related to the activities of legislators in Canada and the USA with a view to developing engineered features which might reflect political performance. These engineered features should be granular enough to significantly inflect during the course of a parliamentary or legislative session, providing quantitative and comparative performance insight.
Serious Labs

Realtime simulators in virtual reality are a leading-edge technology to provide standardized training and evaluation that contribute to heavy-equipment operator safety. They aim to reduce accidents due to operator inexperience by training an operator in scenarios before they are expected to perform these same tasks in reality. To satisfy the high frame-rate requirements of real-time simulation, algorithms to solve these models must be extremely efficient and yield predictable and reproducible results.

The simulation of heavy equipment involves simulating both physical bodies in motion and hydraulic pressures. The goal of this project is to develop an approach to the simulation of fluid pressure volumes that can be interfaced with a position-based dynamics (PBD) simulation, improving performance and providing a more realistic experience.

ATCO
Among the renewable and clean energy technologies, wind energy is one of the most efficient, costing 1–2 cents per kilowatt-hour after the production tax credit by governments. While natural wind speeds over various continents in the world span from 0 to 20 m/s, Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT) placed on highway medians make it possible to utilize consistently higher wind speeds due to vehicle motion. Additionally, the energy generated by these wind turbines is reported to increase multi-fold due to the shearing winds generated on both sides of the medians by the on-going traffic. In this project, we will seek to optimize the positioning of turbines to achieve optimal results using criteria determined to be important, such as output power, ease of installation/repair, proximity to consumers, additive effects from positioning etc. We will use real-life traffic, geographical and weather data, and subsequently investigate economic feasibility of implementation of this technology.
City of Winnipeg - Insect Control Branch

The City of Winnipeg’s Insect Control Branch (ICB) of the Public Works Department provides services to Winnipeg residents to control insects, including mosquitoes. The mosquito control program is based on an environmentally mindful insect control strategy, and includes: (1) A larviciding program that is 100% biological and uses four larviciding helicopters, (2) Monitoring and treating over 31,500 hectares of water area on an ongoing basis based on weather conditions, and (3) Monitoring for adult nuisance mosquitoes in New Jersey Light Traps beginning early May.

In this project, we will examine some of the key challenges facing the ICB such as (1) Predictive modelling of adult mosquito populations subject to changes in rainfall/soil moisture content and wind speed (2) Preditictive modelling of larval development subject to changes in spring and summer temperatures.