Faculty of Applied Science &amp; Engineering

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Undergraduate Students

Subheadline

Connor Isaac is embarking on a year-long work experience term with Walpole Island First Nation, where he will be focused on the community's renewable energy future

Growing up on Walpole Island First Nation, Connor Isaac experienced a creative impulse from an early age – a trait that ultimately led him to the ��Ƶ where he's exploring sustainability solutions.

“I would take apart electronics, I would play with Legos, play puzzle games, different things like that – it kind of fostered this creative mindset,” he says of his childhood.

“My teacher recommended that I look into engineering, and I thought, ‘You know what? That’s not a bad idea.’”

Now a third-year mechanical engineering student in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Isaac says he is preparing to give back to the community where he got his start.

He is embarking on a 12-month role working alongside Chief and Council on Walpole Island First Nation as part of the Professional Experience Year Co-op Program (PEY Co-op). As U of T Engineering’s flagship work-experience program, the co-op allows students to graduate with up to 20 months of meaningful work experience while earning a competitive salary and gaining professional skills in industry.

“I started working with Chief and Council last summer, sitting in their meetings and just kind of assessing projects on the island. I told them that I would be completing a PEY Co-op work term, and they said it would be great if I could come back,” Isaac says.

“This time my work is going to be more focused on Walpole Island First Nation’s renewable energy future. Since it’s a whole year, I’m hoping that it gives me a good idea of what it’s like working in industry.”

Isaac, who is Chippewa (Ojibwe) and Potawatom, and was raised between Walpole Island First Nation and the nearby town of Wallaceburg, Ont., says one of his biggest motivators for returning to Walpole Island is the chance to bring awareness of new, sustainable technologies to the community.

“I’m looking forward to helping the people living on Walpole Island First Nation understand what technology we’re using, because there’s a big disconnect,” he says. “I want to help inform the community about the various things that the Council is doing that will help them.”

Isaac’s commitment to sustainability goes beyond his PEY Co-op. He’s also involved in undergraduate research with David Sinton, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, and his team.

“I have been working with Professor Sinton on CO2 to ethanol research, which is a carbon capture clean technology where we capture CO2 from the air to be run through an electrolyzer. This will allow us to generate ethanol and other useful carbon-based products,” Isaac says.

He is also working alongside Tracy Galloway, an associate professor of anthropology at U of T Mississauga, as a research assistant on the CANSTOREnergy project, a U of T-led collaboration that includes researchers from 11 Canadian universities. The team is developing clean energy technologies tailored to the needs of communities in the Yukon.

“Professor Sinton told me about the CANSTOREnergy project, and I mentioned that I have worked with my reserve during the summer, communicating similar ideas to the Chief and Council, but not so much to the community,” he says.

In the past, researchers have come into Indigenous communities to conduct studies without consulting the people affected, adds Isaac.

“We’re trying to avoid that.”

Upon graduation, Isaac hopes to pursue graduate studies.

“I am heavily considering a master’s degree, but I’m not too sure in which area. I don’t want to plan too far ahead because sometimes life gets in the way,” he says.

“My focus right now is helping the people that I grew up with and giving back to the community that raised me.”

Research team explores next-gen vaccines to guard against sexually transmitted infections

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 16:07:53 +0000

Research team explores next-gen vaccines to guard against sexually transmitted infections

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/04/2024 - 12:07

Cutline

Aereas Aung, an assistant professor in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering , is developing new tools to study and manipulate immune cells and their reaction to vaccines (photo by Tim Fraser)

Qin Dai

Topic

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Connaught Fund

Vaccines

Subheadline

"This work could lay the foundation for more effective vaccines that curb the spread of STIs, particularly in marginalized communities disproportionately affected by these diseases”

A research team from the ��Ƶ is creating a new generation of vaccines that aims to overcome key hurdles faced by some existing formulations.

For example, a common shortcoming of many traditional vaccines is that they can’t produce antibodies in tissues where sexually transmitted infections (STIs) often enter the body.

“Most current vaccines fail to produce sufficient antibodies within mucosal tissues, leaving a significant gap in our defense against sexually transmitted infections,” says Aereas Aung, an assistant professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering who is leading the research effort.

“Our goal is to develop a novel strategy that leverages the strengths of parenteral vaccination while also targeting the mucosal immune system.”

Normally vaccines are injected parenterally, meaning it is injected into or under the skin, into the muscle or directly into the bloodstream. The vaccine then travels to lymph nodes, which are small glands that help produce antibodies. Mucosal tissues in the cervix and rectum present a unique challenge since the mucus in these areas can break down the vaccine quickly and wash it away, making it difficult to reach the lymph nodes and be effective.

Aung’s research proposes fusing a protein carrier to the disease antigens, allowing it to reach distant mucosal lymph nodes after injection.

“We aim to incorporate potent immunostimulatory components into our antigen construct, optimizing its distribution and enhancing mucosal antibody responses,” says Aung.

“If successful, this work could lay the foundation for more effective vaccines that curb the spread of STIs, particularly in marginalized communities disproportionately affected by these diseases.”

Aung’s project is one of 51 U of T faculty members whose work is being supported by the Connaught New Researcher Awards in the most recent round – and one of eight at U of T Engineering. The award helps early-career faculty members establish their research programs.

The other U of T Engineering researchers whose projects are supported by the award are: 

Mohammed Basheer, department of civil and mineral engineering – Integrated hydrological-statistical method and tool for landslide susceptibility mapping in a changing climate
Daniel Franklin, Institute of Biomedical Engineering – Development of equitable pulse oximeters
Sarah Haines, department of civil and mineral engineering – Open Plenums & Indoor Environments (OPEN): Evaluating the impact of return air systems on indoor environmental quality
Mark Jeffrey, Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering – Productively surmounting the memory wall with task parallelism
Caitlin Maikawa, Institute of Biomedical Engineering – Affinity-directed dynamic polymer materials for biomarker sensing
Mohamad Moosavi, department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry – Learning the Language of Metal-Organic Frameworks Topology
Cindy Rottmann, Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP) – But I could be fired! How early career engineers hold the public paramount from organizationally subordinate locations

U of T researchers integrate crucial immune cells onto heart-on-a-chip platform

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:56:51 +0000

U of T researchers integrate crucial immune cells onto heart-on-a-chip platform

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 08/23/2024 - 08:56

Cutline

L-R: U of T post-doctoral fellow Shira Landau, PhD alum Yimu Zhao and Professor Milica Radisic are three of the primary authors of a study that could lead to advancements in the creation of more stable and functional heart tissues (supplied images)

Qin Dai

Topic

Institute of Biomedical Engineering

Toronto General Hospital

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

University Health Network

Subheadline

The immune cells, known as primitive macrophages, were found to enhance heart tissue function and vessel stability

Researchers at the ��Ƶ have discovered a novel method for incorporating primitive macrophages – crucial immune cells – into heart-on-a-chip technology, in a potentially transformative step forward in drug testing and heart disease modeling.

In a study published in Cell Stem Cell, an interdisciplinary team of scientists describe how they integrated the macrophages – which were derived from human stem cells and resemble those found in the early stages of heart development – onto the platforms. These macrophages are known to have remarkable abilities in promoting vascularization and enhancing tissue stability.

Corresponding author Milica Radisic, a senior scientist in the University Health Network's Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and professor in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, says the approach promises to enhance the functionality and stability of engineered heart tissues.

“We demonstrated here that stable vascularization of a heart tissue in vitro requires contributions from immune cells, specifically macrophages. We followed a biomimetic approach, re-establishing the key constituents of a cardiac niche,” says Radisic, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Functional Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering

“By combining cardiomyocytes, stromal cells, endothelial cells and macrophages, we enabled appropriate cell-to-cell crosstalk such as in the native heart muscle.”

Professor Milica Radisic's research team have worked on developing a miniaturized version of cardiac tissue on heart-on-a-chip platforms for a decade (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

A major challenge in creating bioengineered heart tissue is achieving a stable and functional network of blood vessels. Traditional methods have struggled to maintain these vascular networks over extended periods, limiting their effectiveness for long-term studies and applications.

In their study, researchers demonstrated that the primitive macrophages could create stable, perfusable microvascular networks within the cardiac tissue, a feat that had previously been difficult to achieve.

Furthermore, the macrophages helped reduce tissue damage by mitigating cytotoxic effects, thereby improving the overall health and functionality of the engineered tissues.

“The inclusion of primitive macrophages significantly improved the function of cardiac tissues, making them more stable and effective for longer periods,” says Shira Landau, a post-doctoral fellow in Radisic’s lab and one of the study’s lead authors.

The breakthrough has far-reaching implications for the field of cardiac research. By enabling the creation of more stable and functional heart tissues, researchers can better study heart diseases and test new drugs in a controlled environment.

Researchers say this technology could lead to more accurate disease models and more effective treatments for heart conditions.

Healthy aging in place: New pilot program to provide high-tech cognitive, physical enrichment for seniors

rahul.kalvapalle — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 13:32:02 +0000

Healthy aging in place: New pilot program to provide high-tech cognitive, physical enrichment for seniors

rahul.kalvapalle Thu, 08/22/2024 - 09:32

Cutline

2RaceWithMe, a tool developed by Professor Mark Chignell from the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in U of T's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, combines physical and cognitive engagement by requiring users to pedal to be able to watch scenic videos (photo by Justin Greaves/Centivizer)

Safa Jinje

Topic

department of mechanical and industrial engineering

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Connaught Fund

Subheadline

The initiative, supported by a Connaught Community Partnership Research Program award, explores the use of interactive tools to promote active lifestyles among older adults

Older adults living in a Toronto co-operative apartment building will soon have access to high-tech activity spaces designed to promote cognitive, physical and social enrichment, thanks to a new pilot project led by the ��Ƶ’s Mark Chignell.

The activity spaces aim to promote healthy aging for older adults who are aging in place – meaning they have the social and health supports to live safely and independently. They will be located in the communal area of a City Park co-op building that is considered a naturally occurring retirement community, where more than 30 per cent of occupants are over the age of 65.

The initiative was launched by Chignell, a professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, in collaboration with HelpAge Canada, a non-profit that supports community-based services for seniors, and AGE-WELL, a research network and U of T institutional strategic initiative.

It’s one of nine projects to be supported by 2024-25 Community Partnership Research Program awards, given by U of T’s Connaught Fund with the aim of accelerating research carried out in collaboration with community partners and driven by their needs and priorities.

“My work is motivated by the fact that physical and cognitive health can decline very quickly for older adults,” says Chignell.

“We know the physical body and brain work together, and that physical exercise is important for cognitive status and preventing dementia. So being able to promote more active lifestyles for people who are still living independently in the community can have an immense benefit for our society.”

The activity spaces will feature products from Centivizer, a U of T startup spun off from Chignell’s research, that specializes in creating interactive activities, games and cognitive assessment tools to support healthy aging.

These include 2RaceWithMe, a device that promotes both physical and cognitive engagement by having users pedal while watching scenic videos that only play when the pedals are in motion.

Centivizer has also developed a suite of whack-a-mole-style games for cognitive assessment that Chignell hopes can be used to promote cognitive safety in clinical practice.

A two-time recipient of Connaught Innovation Awards, Chignell says he feels honoured to now receive support from the Connaught Fund's Community Partnership Research Program.

“The Connaught is a great validation as I start this project in naturally occurring retirement communities,” says Chignell. “I am also continuing to work with retirement homes and long-term care centres, including a new collaboration with a long-term care home in Tokyo, Japan.

“I’m hoping that this project will demonstrate the value of using our products in the community to help older people retain their physical and cognitive abilities for longer.”

U of T startup Honeybee acquired by global clinical trials firm Leapcure

rahul.kalvapalle — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:55:48 +0000

U of T startup Honeybee acquired by global clinical trials firm Leapcure

rahul.kalvapalle Fri, 08/16/2024 - 10:55

Cutline

(photo courtesy of Leapcure)

Rahul Kalvapalle

Topic

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

U of T Entrepreneurship

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Health Innovation Hub

Impact Centre

ONRamp

Startups

Subheadline

Co-founded by Catherine Chan and Weiwei Li, Honeybee Trials' platform helps clinical trial recruiters find, screen and manage patients for their research

Honeybee Trials, a ��Ƶ startup that connects research teams with patients and study participants, has been acquired by global clinical trials company Leapcure in a deal that is poised to drive more inclusive and affordable trials that’s ultimately applicable to a broader population.

Co-founded by U of T alumni Catherine Chan and Weiwei Li, Honeybee built a web and mobile platform to help clinical trial teams attract, screen, recruit and manage study participants. Since its founding in 2019, the startup has connected over 30,000 patients and participants to more than 1,000 clinical trials across North America.

Leapcure, headquartered in California, offers an array of solutions that combines people-backed services with data-driven technologies to fill clinical trials for global sponsors and CROs, but can now expand affordable patient recruitment to institutional sites, private sites and biotech firms. Moreover, their work alongside patients and advocacy groups has significantly helped to reach underrepresented communities – a focus that will receive a boost following the purchase of Honeybee.

Chan, who earned a master’s degree in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s department of nutritional sciences, says the deal grew out of a desire to partner strategically with a larger company that could provide access to broader sectors within the clinical research world.

Catherine Chan (L) and Weiwei Li (supplied image)

“At Honeybee, we offered competitive pricing for academic and hospital sites, local CROs [contract research organizations] and biotech firms,” Chan says. “With this partnership, we’re able to provide services across all of the different types of trial scopes and sizes.”

She adds that both Honeybee and Leapcure have placed a strong focus on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility by helping researchers attract study participants of different ethnicities, ages, genders and sexual orientations – helping make clinical trials more equitable and reflective of the wider population.

“It’s important to us that there's a mission and vision alignment between the companies... it couldn’t be a better fit,” Chan said.

The asset purchase deal for an undisclosed amount, which was announced in an Aug. 13 press release, will see Chan transition from CEO of Honeybee to senior director of product at Leapcure.

“We’re excited to join forces with Catherine and Honeybee. They’ve been really focused on the newest recruitment technologies that are most impactful for both patients and research,” said Leapcure CEO Zachary Gobst. “A big reason that things came together was our alignment on impact first. It’s a credit to how they’ve been approaching their business the right way from the beginning."

Honeybee evolved out of the frustrations that Chan faced in recruiting study participants for her master’s thesis. Motivated to explore solutions, Chan created a prototype that would help match participants with trials; she then enrolled in a one-week accelerator program in the Impact Centre (now the Centre for Entrepreneurship) in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

She soon teamed up with Li, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s of applied science degrees from the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, to co-found Honeybee. The startup later joined the Health Innovation Hub (H2i) accelerator and operated out of office space in U of T Entrepreneurship’s ONRamp facility prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With COVID-19 measures encouraging the adoption of digital tools by clinical research teams, Honeybee found itself well-placed to play an important role. “The pandemic provided an opportunity for many tech companies to scale as the market became more open-minded and ready to adopt technologies to help connect them day-to-day," Chan says. "We saw a rapid adoption of Honeybee’s technology during this time where people moved away from traditional recruitment and patient communications to the current age.

“Although digital adoption across other industries has grown quite rapidly, healthcare has lagged behind, rightfully so and for many reasons, but we’re glad the transformation is happening. Just five years ago, clinical trial coordinators were still using paper handouts to recruit on the street and paper calendars to schedule patients.

“The pandemic expedited researchers being able to meet people where they are.”

Chan says the acquisition by Leapcure will enable the rollout of tiered services ranging from low-cost, self-serve tiers – targeting research teams with more modest budgets – to higher levels of service that include dedicated management.

“I’m really excited about the solutions we now have to offer together as well as the next steps in how we’re going to disrupt clinical trials.”

Professor Paul Santerre, co-founder and director of H2i, hailed Chan as "a model outcome" of the accelerator's mission to empower innovators in translating their ideas into products and companies that tackle important problems.

“Catherine and her team’s achievements are transformative in terms of democratizing the recruitment of patients for clinical study cohorts," said Santerre, the Baxter Chair for Health Technology and Commercialization at the University Health Network and professor in the Faculty of Dentistry and Institute of Biomedical Engineering who is cross-appointed to the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry.

"She has much to still teach us about the power of digital tools and their ethical use to achieve impact in clinical research trials – and this acquisition will accelerate that outcome."

U of T team takes top spot in self-driving car challenge for 6th time in 7 years

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:42:55 +0000

U of T team takes top spot in self-driving car challenge for 6th time in 7 years

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/07/2024 - 13:42

Cutline

As part of the competition, the U of T team’s autonomous vehicle had to react to obstacles such as a fake deer moving across the road (photo courtesy of aUToronto)

Safa Jinje

Topic

Alumni

Artificial Intelligence

Graduate Students

Self-Driving Cars

Undergraduate Students

UTIAS

Subheadline

"Each time we saw an obstacle – a stop sign, a red light, the railroad bar coming down – and the car reacted by stopping and then continuing, we let out a big cheer or a sigh of relief"

A team from the ��Ƶ has placed first for sixth time in seven years in a North American self-driving car competition.

After finishing in second place last year, the aUToronto team returned to the top spot at the 2024 SAE AutoDrive Challenge II, which was held in June at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The aUToronto team competed against nine other teams from across Canada and the United States.

“Through the AutoDrive Challenge, we are preparing the next generation of engineers to head into the industry, to keep pushing towards the challenging goal of reaching Level 4 autonomous driving,” says Tim Barfoot, a professor at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and one of the team’s academic advisers.

“The team did another excellent job this year.”

The team approached the competition by going back to first principles to ensure they had a reliable and robust system, says Kelvin Cui, a U of T Engineering alumnus and the team’s principal.

He joined aUToronto last fall after five years with the ��Ƶ Formula Racing team, where he founded the “driverless” division.

“We looked at what was going to get us the most points at competition and made sure that we were not overbuilding our system and adding too much complexity,” he says.

This meant pushing for additional testing time at UTIAS and achieving more than 900 kilometres of system testing prior to the competition.

The team placed first out of 10 teams from institutions across the United States and Canada (photo courtesy of aUToronto)

A partnership with the AutoDrive team from Queen’s University was instrumental to aUToronto’s preparation. The aUToronto team drove Artemis, their autonomous vehicle, to Kingston, Ont. to assess the system at Queen’s testing facility, which features intersections and electronic streetlights.

“We added radar to our vehicle as a new sensor, so we needed to be aware of all the sensor failure modes,” says third-year Engineering Science student Robert Ren.

“A lot of our testing time went into making sure that including radar didn’t break anything else in our system, and that it could handle any sensor failure cases.”

Including radar sensors in the vehicle’s perception system allowed it to measure the motion of objects directly, which is not possible with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. 

“Radar can help with adverse weather object detections,” adds Ren. “So, if the vehicle is operating under heavy rain or fog, the LiDAR is going to be limited, but the radio waves from radar can help the vehicle see what objects are in front and what objects are moving. This enables it to make good decisions when driving in uncertain scenarios.” 

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A post shared by aUToronto (@autoronto_uoft)

In an event where both LiDAR and radar sensors fail, the aUToronto system can still rely on visual cameras to perform object tracking. This made the team’s object tracker much more robust compared to last year when the team experienced sensor failure during a dynamic event.

Brian Cheong, a U of T Engineering master’s student who has been a member of aUToronto since 2021, acted as technical director of the autonomy team this year – part of a new leadership structure introduced by Cui.  

“In the past, it was a lot of work for our team’s principal to keep track of all the systems,” Cheong says. “So instead of having to work directly with all 15 sub teams, Kelvin created groups of sub teams that we called stacks, and each stack had a director.”

The restructuring and technical innovations paid off, with aUToronto completing its first clean sweep in the AutoDrive Challenge II, placing first in all static and dynamic events, including the concept design presentation and intersection challenge.

“The intersection challenge was a big highlight for us,” says Cheong. “Kelvin and Robert were in the car, and I was on the sidelines watching with the rest of the team. Each time we saw an obstacle – a stop sign, a red light, the railroad bar coming down – and the car reacted by stopping and then continuing, we let out a big cheer or a sigh of relief.

“And then we were all silent as the car approached the final obstacle, which was a deer. We watched as Artemis slowed down to a stop and the deer moved by. Then we screamed and cheered, and we could hear cheering from inside the car.”

“Our success is entirely a team effort,” adds Cui. “It was not smooth sailing before the competition. The only reason we won is because everybody put in so much effort to test our vehicle every day.

“That’s how we were able to get this reliable system across the line.” 

What makes a chess move brilliant? Researchers use AI to find out

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:25:51 +0000

What makes a chess move brilliant? Researchers use AI to find out

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/07/2024 - 13:25

Cutline

U of T Engineering researchers Kamron Zaidi, left, and Michael Guerzhoy, right, use game trees and deep neural networks to enable chess engines to recognize brilliant moves (photo by Safa Jinje)

Safa Jinje

Topic

Alumni

Artificial Intelligence

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Subheadline

AI system developed by U of T researchers is being used to study human creativity and make a chess computer that is more entertaining to play against

Researchers at the ��Ƶ have designed a new AI model that understands how humans perceive creativity in chess.

In a recent paper presented at an international conference, researchers in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering describe how they used techniques such as game trees and deep neural networks to enable chess engines to recognize brilliant moves.

The development could lead to chess engines that can find the most creative and clever path to victory in game, rather than just making moves to maximize win rates. That, in turn, could have implications for other AI systems tasked with creative endeavours.

“A chess move can be perceived as brilliant, or creative, when the strategic payoff isn’t clear at first, but in retrospect the player had to follow a precise path in gaming out all the possibilities to see so far into the future,” says paper co-author Michael Guerzhoy, an assistant professor, teaching stream, of mechanical and industrial engineering and engineering science who wrote about the research on his Substack.

“We wanted our system to understand human perception of what constitutes brilliance in chess and distinguish that from just winning.”

Most of the current research into chess AI is focused on enabling moves that create a higher chance of winning. But this doesn’t always make for an exciting game.

Skilled human chess players, on the other hand, can play in a more dramatic or imaginative way by making moves that may break traditional rules –for example, sacrificing a piece in a way that may initially look like a mistake, but ultimately, paves the way to a win.

A chess board depicts a move from the “Game of the Century” in 1956, when future American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer (black) sacrificed his queen in a move that was celebrated as brilliant (photo by Safa Jinje)

The team worked with Leela Chess Zero, a top chess engine that learns through self-play and has played over 1.6 billion games against itself. They also employed Maia, a human-like neural network chess engine developed by U of T computer science researchers.

“We used the two neural network chess engines to create our game trees at different levels of depth in a game,” says paper co-author Kamron Zaidi, a recent U of T Engineering graduate.

“Using these game trees, we extracted many different features from it. We then fed the features into a neural network that we trained on the Lichess database of online chess games, which are labelled by human users of the database.”

A game tree in chess represents the current state of a chess board along with all the possible moves and counter moves that can occur. Each board position is represented as a node and the game tree can be expanded on until the game is either won, drawn or lost.

The researchers began with small game trees then slowly increased the size, adding more nodes to the tree. They found that when the neural network looks at all the game tree features and makes a prediction as to whether the move is brilliant or not, it reached an accuracy rate of 79 per cent using the test data set.

The research – based on Zaidi’s undergraduate engineering science thesis, which was supervised by Guerzhoy – was presented at the International Conference on Computational Creativity in Jönköping, Sweden.

“There were people from all over the world presenting research on more traditional aspects of creativity, but we were all focused on the same thing, which is, ‘How can we use AI to enhance our interactions and understandings of creativity?’” says Zaidi. 

The work has also received media coverage in outlets, including New Scientist, where English chess grandmaster Matthew Sadler says that a model that can understand brilliance could be used as a training tool for professionals and potentially lead to a more entertaining engine opponent for amateur players.

The team sees their system as having broad applicability when it comes to perception of creativity and brilliance.

“One of the biggest areas that is of interest to me is characterizing what we perceive as creativity,” says Guerzhoy.

“Not just in board games but in other creative endeavours, including music and art, where there is a formal framework and rules that need to be followed. Highly creative work involves planning in advance and gaming out the possibilities.

“But everyone I’ve talked to since the paper came out wants to know when they can play against our brilliant chess engine. So, I think making that possible is the obvious next step for us.”

U of T Engineering student team wins international prize with sustainable wind turbine

rahul.kalvapalle — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:44:46 +0000

U of T Engineering student team wins international prize with sustainable wind turbine

rahul.kalvapalle Tue, 08/06/2024 - 09:44

Cutline

From left to right: UTWind team members Robert Zhao, Joeun Yook, Micheal Jing, Dhara Patel, Alexis Terefenko, Justin Ding, Andre Li and Alex Chen (photo by Niels Adema)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research and Innovation

Undergraduate Students

Subheadline

It’s the UTWind team’s second victory at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest, following their win in 2022

A team of students from the ��Ƶ’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have earned top spot in the International Small Wind Turbine Contest with a design that utilized components from recycled pop bottles and plant-fibre composites.

The competition, which is hosted annually at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen in the Netherlands, challenges student teams to design and build a small-scale wind turbine for deployment in sub-Saharan Africa. Teams are evaluated on the overall energy yield of their turbine, the sustainability of their design, the quality of their construction and the presentation they give to the judges.

The UTWind team's first-place finish saw them outcompete seven other teams from countries including Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. This is the second time the team won the contest, following their debut performance in 2022.

Justin Ding, a second-year mechanical engineering student and incoming co-lead of UTWind's mechanical and manufacturing team, says the team made improvements to the pitch system for this year’s design and implemented more sustainable materials.

“For example, we used plant-based flax fibre composites to make the blades, which makes them lighter. The nose cone was made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET plastic, which is more sustainable than using new material,” Ding says.

“We gathered plastic pop bottles from around campus, including the student-run Hard Hat Café,” says third-year mechanical engineering student Elena Sloan, the other co-lead of the mechanical and manufacturing team. “We then cut these bottles into strips and extruded them through a heated nozzle to make 1.75 mm diameter filament, which we could use in our 3D printer.”

Once the turbine was complete, it was disassembled and packed into four bags of checked luggage for the flight to the Netherlands. The team’s first stop was Delft, where their turbine underwent testing in a wind tunnel at Delft University of Technology’s Open Jet Facility.

The testing showed that the team was able to harvest about 36 per cent of the available energy at a wind speed of 8.5 metres per second, a solid, but not outstanding result.

From there, the team members took a three-hour train ride across the country to Groningen, where they gave their technical presentation, followed by the awards ceremony.

“We didn’t really expect to win best overall, but we thought we had a decent chance at winning for the most sustainable design,” says Dhara Patel, incoming co-president of UTWind and a second-year electrical engineering student.

“When we found out we didn’t win that award, we were pretty devastated, but it was a complete shock to then find out that we won the whole competition – our mouths just hung open for a while.”

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A post shared by UTWind (@utwindclub)

Going forward, Patel says the team would like to try building a vertical-axis turbine in addition to their standard horizontal-axis version. “Vertical-axis turbines look really cool, and they are structurally simpler and have a lower profile than horizontal-axis ones,” she says.

“Only one other team has tried that. We’d like to take on that challenge, and ultimately put one on our own campus buildings to generate clean wind power.”

Patel was a high school student when UTWind won their first competition in 2022, and says reading about their success was one of the things that inspired her to study engineering at U of T. The team she eventually came to co-lead now includes more than 50 engineering students as well as some from the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Students are divided into five sub-teams: aerodynamics, mechanical and manufacturing, control systems, power systems and sustainability.

The team members say they’re energized by their win, and have big plans for next year.

“We’ve learned so many lessons – before, during and after the contest,” says Robert Zhao, UTWind's other incoming co-president and an undergraduate student in the department of physics.

“But our competitors have also learned those lessons, and there are more of them than ever before. We need to improve our winning design, making it more robust and more mature to better defend our title.”

U of T researchers develop foam filter system to mop up oil spills faster

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 18:11:38 +0000

U of T researchers develop foam filter system to mop up oil spills faster

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 08/01/2024 - 14:11

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Associate Professor Amy Bilton, left, and fellow team members Calvin Rieder, Puwaner Gou, Nitish Sarker, along with Jordan Bouchard (not pictured), show off a prototype of their polymer foam filter technology (photo courtesy of Monisha Naik)

Selah Katona

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The team, which has advanced to the final stage of a national competition, is testing a polymer foam filter system that would allow oil spill response vessels to treat contaminated water on board

A research team from the ��Ƶ has advanced to the final stage of a national competition that seeks to develop better ways to protect Canada from the devastating effects of oil spills.

The team, led by Amy Bilton, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, has been awarded $1.3 million via Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) Oil Spill Response Challenge to develop and test a system that treats contaminated water onboard oil spill response ships.

Called FRODO, the prototype allows for treatment of contaminated water stored in response vessels through an engineered polymer foam filter – not unlike a kitchen sponge – that allows water to pass while syphoning off the small oil particles. The filter and treatment system would allow the ship to release previously contaminated water back into the environment. That, in turn, means more oil can be collected in less time.

A FRODO prototype unit showing the canisters that hold the foam filter that allows water to pass through (photo courtesy of Amy Bilton)

By contrast, current approaches involve response vessels gathering oil with large, floating barriers before using a skimmer to suck oil and water into their holds. The ships must then offload the entire load – about 25 per cent oil and 75 per cent water with small trace amounts of oil – to a land-based facility for treatment.

“We’re both engineering the foam material and developing the treatment process to fill in a gap in current oil spill operations,” says Bilton. “We aim to increase the amount of oil these vessels can collect by a factor of four.”

More than four million barrels of oil are transported through Canada daily. With more than 240,000 kilometres of coastline and more than 890,000 kilometres of freshwater systems across the country, effective oil spill response is critical in protecting diverse ecosystems and communities. Through the Oil Spill Response Challenge, the Government of Canada is investing $10 million in the development of innovative and rapidly deployable solutions to oil spill detection, response and recovery in Canada’s aquatic environments.

Assessing the environmental impact is another key area of research for the Bilton team. Canada has a zero-discharge policy, meaning no oil can be present in water when discharging it back into our water systems. These regulations vary by country. Norway, for example, requires the amount of oil in the discharge to be less than 15 parts per million. Bilton and her team are running a parallel project funded through NRCan’s Multi-partner Research Initiative to understand the environmental impact and considerations of implementing this in-situ treatment process.

Bilton’s team is one of the five finalists moving on to Stage 3 of the competition, with the winner set to be announced in winter of 2025. At this stage, the team has one year to accelerate, scale and test their prototype in preparation for commercialization.

“We are in the testing phase now and are planning large-scale simulations at our Ohmsett partner facility in New Jersey,” says Bilton.

The team is partnering with Western and Eastern Coast Marine Response Corporations, VPC Group and Urethane Sciences to ensure their system is scalable and can be manufactured. The current prototype is significantly smaller – around one metre in size – than what the final system will be. Ensuring the engineered polymer foam and other materials can be manufactured and meet strict requirements are top of mind at this stage of the challenge.

“Our goal is that this system can be deployed quickly and effectively to improve oil spill response across Canada, and potentially in other parts of the world,” says Bilton.

The research team that wins the final stage will receive an additional $2 million in funding to commercialize their technology.

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Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:16:30 +0000

More with less: Researchers map a more sustainable path to home construction in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/31/2024 - 14:16

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(photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

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