From former industrial sites to rail yards and abandoned gas stations, there are an estimated 22,000 environmentally contaminated sites across the country. These areas are polluted with hazardous chemicals that could impact human health, ecosystems and the drinking water supply.

To help remediate these sites, the University of Toronto has been awarded $1.65 million from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC) to support student training and research in environmental clean-up.

Civil engineering Professor Brent Sleep will oversee the establishment of the Remediation Education Network (RENEW) with the funds, which come from NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program.

“At the really old contaminated sites,” said Sleep, “hazardous wastes were not properly managed, often being disposed of in unlined pits or buried in drums that eventually rusted, leaking contaminants into the environment. More recent spills have been caused by accidents like pipeline leaks and train derailments.

“The problem with many groundwater contaminants such as chlorinated solvents is that once they’re in the ground, they stay there for a long time, because they’re fairly recalcitrant,” he said. “They’re trapped in the subsurface as pools of liquid that are slowly dissolving into the groundwater. They may also produce vapours that may be hazardous.”

The NSERC funding will support 42 master’s students, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows over six years. Many of them will attend U of T — the first cohort will be admitted for the

2014-15 school year — and will study with Sleep or with co-investigators Professors Elizabeth Edwards and Edgar Acosta (both ChemE) and Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar of Earth Sciences. Some will attend Queen’s, Western and Waterloo and study with project partners there.

At U of T and their home universities, students will conduct research into the hydrogeology, chemistry and microbiology of contaminated sites and into processes that might be used to remove the contaminants or transform them to harmless compounds.

Students will also spend 20 per cent of their time working with partner companies. RENEW has established partnerships with seven environmental remediation companies to provide internships for the students, giving them practical experience in site assessment and clean-up.

“The companies are interested in the research,” said Sleep, “but they are also interested in attracting qualified students who may someday work in the industry.” Currently generating $1.7 billion in revenue per year, environmental remediation is a growing sector.

Students will also be trained in skills like project management, communication and leadership, preparing them for both academic and non-academic careers.

“The CREATE program not only brings benefit to U of T in the form of student support and training,” says Professor Peter Lewis, the university’s interim vice-president, research and innovation, “it tackles some of society’s most pressing problems. In this case, we will be training students to better understand and address a critical environmental challenge from within universities and from within industry. Congratulations to Professor Sleep and his colleagues and thank you to NSERC for this investment.”

Some of the RENEW students will continue work begun by Sleep at a former petrochemical plant contaminated with a variety of chlorinated solvents, many of which are carcinogenic. At the site, a reactive form of iron was injected into the soil, where it reacted with the chlorinated solvents and transformed them into harmless components. Sleep believes this also created conditions that stimulated naturally-occurring bacteria to provide additional remediation of the contaminants.

Back at U of T, Sleep and collaborators are working on understanding the chemistry and microbiology of the site so they can develop new and more effective methods for cleaning up contaminated sites.

“These spills can persist for decades if nothing is done to clean them up.”

 

As you type your emails, draft documents or write poems – any time your fingers press the keyboard – you could be charging the battery of your computer, or storing energy for later use.

Deep Prasad (ECE), a first-year undergraduate and fellow of the Engineering faculty’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, is designing novel ways to harness energy that could make keyboard energy generation possible – and change the way we charge our devices.

Prasad’s idea propelled him into the final round of voting for The Next Einstein contest, an initiative run by The Hebrew University in Jerusalem in conjunction with the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University.

To become a top ten finalist, Prasad had to get the backing of a diverse panel of judges that included Nobel laureates, business and community leaders, and even the NBA’s Amar’e Stoudemire.

Albert Einstein himself was on the first board of governors at The Hebrew University, and the innovation competition now bearing his name seeks to support similarly world-changing ideas as those developed by the father of the theory of relativity.

“There are many online competitions today, but most of them are very, very limited,” CHFU President & CEO Rami Kleinmann told Shalom Toronto. “Everything is generally limited to a specific area or niche. We said that we want to encourage free and creative thinking.

“Albert Einstein, who came up with the theory of relativity, served as a clerk in the patent office of the Swiss mail service. He didn’t sit in some complex laboratory with all kinds of modern accessories.”

Prasad has already been singled out as one of the innovation stars of his cohort, as he and his brother continue to develop technology to reduce “vampire power” wasted by electrical appliances.

“Deep’s curiosity and eagerness to explore is very inspiring,” says Joseph Orozco, director of The Entrepreneurship Hatchery. “We are proud that The Hatchery factored into his decision to study at U of T.”

Prasad explained his newest concept to U of T News.

What is your (next) Einstein idea?
My idea for the next Einstein competition is based on harnessing energy that is generated by typing. Basically, when you press down on anything with force, that energy can be absorbed and converted to electrical energy.

How did you come up with the concept?
I keep something called an “Ideas Journal” where I write down a new idea everyday, and document how one could go about making it. This happened to be one of the ideas from my journal. I got the idea when I was walking up a staircase and realized how much gravitational energy we exert on to the stairs. On a smaller scale, I wanted to harness a similar type of energy, so I settled on the idea of keyboards that generate electricity when pressed on.

What kind of impact could this idea have?
One of the greatest problems in today’s world is the way we harness energy, how we use it, and lack of energy in general. With over 300 million keyboards sold, even a fraction of this technology integrated in these keyboards could make a big difference. Imagine seeing a light bulb turn on as you type, or charging your own laptop without needing to plug it in to an outlet as often.

Furthermore, we could attach energy storing units that could be put away for later use, like batteries, or even shipped off to developing countries.

What are your goals if you win the contest? What’s next if you don’t win the contest?
If I win this contest, I plan on putting away the first $3000-$4000 for strictly research purposes. My design requires something called Piezoelectric materials which actually help to convert different types of energy into electricity.

Once I finish my work at the U of T Hatchery, I will begin research into developing a viable product that can be distributed through a large channel, such as retail, or even KickStarter. The goal is to sell attachable keyboards first, and then hopefully partner up with laptop design companies.

If I don’t win this contest, I will just start putting money away little by little, so I can eventually build the idea on my own during my spare time.

How has U of T helped you develop as an engineer and social entrepreneur?
The most relevant program at U of T that has helped me develop as both an engineer and an entrepreneur is the Hatchery program. It assigns a mentor and co-mentor to each team where they help the team to bring a product to market, while also teaching them important business skills. My mentor for the Hatchery is Professor Jonathan Rose, who is very helpful in both the technical realm of things, and entrepreneurial side too. He is mentoring my younger brother and me as we work to bring one of our inventions to market by the end of the summer.

What else is on the horizon for you?
I look forward to seeing how this competition goes, and even more so what kind of an impact this idea will have. Generating electricity through typing is one thing, but imagine if we can expand this concept to greater mediums of harnessing energy, such as putting this technology under roads, sidewalks, staircases, etc.

Wondering why your hydro bill is so high this month? There is a chance your neighbours are offloading some of their consumption on to you, or even monitoring your usage to learn about your daily habits.

These are concerns that arise as we become more advanced in our regulation of energy through complex cyber networks – and the worries don’t stop there.

At a recent gathering of Canada’s energy and utilities regulators, delegates voiced their greatest fear: a coordinated physical and cyber-attack on critical infrastructure.

“It’s not a question of if but when we are going to have some sort of cyberattack on the grid,” said Philip Jones, former president of the national regulators’ association in the United States, according to The Globe and Mail.

Worries about cyberattacks mounted yet again a week later, when a U.S. district court indicted five Chinese military officials for hacking into the computer systems of Pittsburgh-area companies such as U.S. Steel, Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa and Allegheny Technologies.

“It’s a growing concern in Canada—we’re still evolving toward a highly connected cyber-enabled system,” said Professor Deepa Kundur (ECE), an expert on smart grid cybersecurity in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “As we move into the future, we will start seeing greater dependence on information systems providing greater opportunities for cyber attackers to cause disturbances.”

But why would anyone want to hack into the Canadian grid? What could they learn from doing so?

Plenty, explained Professor Kundur. Whether they’re vandals, local criminals, or shadowy foreign agents, cyber-attackers could act on three possible motives:

Stealing energy

“Energy theft is a strong motivation for many. Someone could hack into smart meters in their neighbourhood to potentially shift their usage onto a neighbour’s,” said Kundur. Grow-ops could distribute their energy usage to neighbourhood premises to avoid drawing attention to their unusual consumption. “High energy usage is often an identifier of nefarious activity by local authorities. To hide, they will need to push their consumption onto another party.”

Obtaining real-time usage records

You can learn a lot about an individual’s daily routines and preferences by examining their energy consumption patterns. Modern meters sample data at high frequency, some as often as every 15 minutes, so any spies would clearly be able to tell when you leave the house and come home again, roughly how many people’s electricity is being used, and even which appliances you own—certain types and even brands of smart refrigerators, televisions, washers and dryers give off unique energy signatures.

Learning the system topology

“It’s always interesting to know the topology of a system, because it will help identify its strengths and its weaknesses,” said Kundur. Consider that a majority of the power used in the U.S. flows through a small fraction of the country’s transformers—disruption of those devices, if their location were known, would have a devastating effect on energy delivery.

You may also have a business reason for wanting to know the magnitude of a country’s investment in renewable energy, or the market penetration of smart meters—maybe you own a factory in China that manufactures those meters, or solar panels. And knowledge of a nation’s nuclear activity and capabilities is of high interest.

Are we ready for these attacks, and many more we haven’t thought of yet? We’re getting there, said Kundur. The ‘smarter’ we make the grid and our homes, the more opportunities we create for cracks to appear at the intersection of cyber and physical systems.

“That’s why my group’s looking at security vulnerabilities now, before it evolves,” she said. “It shouldn’t be an afterthought.”

Read more in the Globe and Mail.

 

 

When Angela Hu (TrackOne 1T8) was a little girl, she would often wonder what was happening on the inside of machines. Fueled by this curiosity, she went on to pursue math and science courses, achieving high grades that led her to U of T Engineering.

On the weekend of May 24-25, Hu travelled from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island to the University of Toronto to join 95 other female students at the Girls Leadership in Engineering Experience, also known as GLEE.

Now in its third year, GLEE is hosted by the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering to welcome female high school students to the engineering community. Currently, approximately one-quarter of the Faculty’s undergraduate students are female.

Over the course of the 30-hour event, attendees were immersed in the dynamic and passionate environment at U of T Engineering. They had the opportunity to meet future classmates, attend a career panel, take part in hands-on engineering workshops and stay overnight at Victoria College residence.

“GLEE has been awesome so far, especially the workshop where we were designing an artificial arm,” said Hu, who recently accepted her offer to TrackOne. “The group successfully did it and we were all so happy about this.”

Participants also attended a semi-formal dinner hosted by Dean Cristina Amon, who welcomed the aspiring engineers with a story about her very first failed experiment:

“When I was a young girl living in Uruguay, I was fascinated by how things worked. I thought there were people inside our radio singing and talking – so one day when my parents were away, I opened it and found there were no little people, but vacuum tubes and capacitors and other old-fashioned electronics. We might call this my first failed experiment!

“While most adults told me to stop disassembling devices, there was one teacher who encouraged me to tinker with things and take them apart. I feel so lucky that she started me on this journey that has taken me around the world, working with brilliant colleagues and amazing students like you.”

During dinner, Professor Angela Schoellig from the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) gave a keynote address, sharing her research on robotics, controls and machine learning. She also demonstrated one of her flying robots.

Schoellig stressed the importance of focusing on subjects that inspire curiosity and fascination, rather than following the expectations of others. “About ten years ago, I was sitting where you are now,” she said. “And I had no idea what I was going to take. The only thing I really knew was that I loved math and the sciences. I learned about a program that would teach me to use math and the engineering sciences to solve real world problems, so I followed my instincts and enrolled. I never would have expected that, one day, I would be here, showing you flying robots. It’s impossible to predict the future, so the best thing you can do is to choose something that you are really passionate about.”

Another incoming student Tatiana Joseph (MechE 1T8), also a strong believer in letting your interests guide you to a career, laughed about her special relationship with math and science. “Me and physics, we go out together,” said Joseph, a Montréal resident whose trip to GLEE brought her to Toronto for the first time. “I’m someone who wants to create things – things that can be useful to other people – and I found that engineering would allow me to do that. There are so many possibilities, it’s exciting.”

Professor En-hui Yang asked information theorists from across the world to doubt absolutely everything — except, of course, their decision to study information theory (IT).

Yang spoke at the IEEE North American School for Information Theory (NASIT’14), hosted this month by the University of Toronto. The conference brought together 100 graduate students from across North America and abroad to spur learning and dialogue about IT – a field that combines applied mathematics, electrical engineering and computer science to examine how humans handle and transmit information.

“Information theory is very beautiful, and we also know that IT has a profound impact on practice,” said Yang, who proposed we use a “method of doubt” to advance IT research in areas like source coding.

NASIT’14 was organized in collaboration with Professors Stark Draper and Ashish Khisti (both ECE), as well as others in Ontario and Quebec. Researchers and graduate students convened in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology for the four-day conference.

Students promoted their work in “30-second madness” exercises before a poster session each day—each presenter had only half a minute to introduce themselves, the central concepts and highlights of their work, and encourage attendees to stop by their poster.

The conference featured six tutorial-style lectures from world leaders in the field, including Professor Robert Calderbank of Duke University, Professor Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford University, Professor Alon Orlitsky of UCSD, Professor Henry Pfister of Texas A&M, Professor Yang from the University of Waterloo and ECE’s own Professor Brendan Frey.

Unravelling the human genome’s three-billion-letter code

Professor Frey spoke about unravelling some of the mysteries of the human genome’s three-billion-letter code. His group is taking a statistical approach to predicting alternative splicing patterns in different cells—the process by which the DNA code is reassembled into protein-making instructions in the form of messenger RNA.

“It turns out there are a lot of deviations that cause diseases in the process of splicing,” said Frey. “We think we have a regulatory model that will predict changes…so now we’re looking at many different diseases,” including neural muscular atrophy and autism spectrum disorder.

On the third day of the conference, the academic focus was complemented with career-oriented events. Professor Robin Sacks, the director of research at U of T’s Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead), led a dynamic workshop that encouraged students and faculty to reflect on and discuss what leadership is, to identify the leadership skills they already have, and to recognize those they need to acquire to be successful in their careers.

There was also an academic- and industrial-themed panel titled “The Road Ahead” where six panellists shared their own career paths and hard-earned wisdom. Panellists included Calderbank and Goldsmith, as well as Professor Laura Balzano of the University of Michigan, Petros Boufounos of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and two U of T Engineering ECE alumni: Behrouz Khoshnevis of the Royal Bank of Canada and Adam Tenenbaum of Telus.

“Our intent was to provide the students a deep, informal and fun learning experience that covered central topics of information theory – multimedia compression, wireless and error-correction coding,” said Draper. “And also to demonstrate how information theoretic thinking has impact on other fields, such as genomics, large-dimensional statistics and signal processing.

NASIT is an annual event sponsored by the IEEE Information Theory Society. This was the seventh school, and was the first to be held in Canada. The location of NASIT’15 will be announced this coming July.

 

 

 

 

Márta Ecsedi (CivE 7T6) knows a little something about being first. During her undergraduate degree at U of T Engineering, she was the first woman to lead the Engineering Society. Later, she served as the first woman president of the Engineering Alumni Association. She was also the founding chair of two different professional engineering advisory committees, the first chair of Women in Motion and a co-founder of the Go ENG Girl program.

This month, Ecsedi joins three other U of T engineers in receiving Ontario Professional Engineers Awards for engineering excellence and community service:

• Professor Natalie Enright Jerger (ECE) has received the Young Engineer Award for her cutting-edge research in computer architecture.
• Professor Frank Vecchio (CivE) has been awarded the Research and Development Medal for his extensive work in developing and understanding longer-lasting concrete.
• Alumna Márta Ecsedi (CivE 7T6) received the Citizenship Award in recognition of her invaluable contributions to women in engineering.
• Alumnus Bin Wu (ElecE MASc 8T9, PhD 9T3) garnered an Engineering Excellence Medal for his advances in more efficient motor technologies.

Given by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), these awards have recognized outstanding engineers across Ontario for over 65 years. Eleven awards in total will be given out this year.

“These prestigious awards recognize the significant contributions made by our faculty and alumni to engineering in Ontario, through both their accomplishments and their service to the profession,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “I am grateful to OSPE and PEO for recognizing these outstanding engineers and I congratulate the recipients on this richly-deserved recognition.”

About Natalie Enright Jerger:

Natalie Enright Jerger has made outstanding contributions to research in computer architecture in the critical areas of interconnection networks and parallel architectures. She is widely recognized as a leading expert in the area of on-chip networks, identifying high-impact problems and finding effective solutions for them. A dedicated educator, Enright Jerger has redesigned the Faculty’s undergraduate fourth-year computer architecture course and introduced a graduate course about on-chip networks. She is co-author of a widely used textbook, On-Chip Networks. Enright Jerger is program chair for the 2014 International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture – the youngest program chair in the conference’s history. She is a passionate advocate for increased gender diversity in STEM, dedicating a great deal of time and effort to the cause.

About Frank Vecchio:

Professor Frank Vecchio is a pioneer in the modeling and analysis of reinforced concrete and its response under extreme loads, such as blast, earthquake, impact and thermal effects. His foundational work in this area led to the development of the Modified Compression Field Theory (MCFT), a groundbreaking conceptual model for describing and understanding the behaviour of reinforced concrete under general load conditions. This model forms the basis for shear concrete design codes in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Vecchio has developed a suite of analysis programs (known as VecTor) for reinforced concrete structures, based on the MCFT, which are used worldwide by students, researchers and practising engineers. He works extensively with government and industry to analyse crucial infrastructure such as offshore platforms, bridges and nuclear containment structures.

About Márta Ecsedi:

Márta Ecsedi has always been a passionate volunteer within the engineering profession and the community. At U of T, she was the first woman president of the Engineering Society and the first woman president of the Engineering Alumni Association, and has also served as president of the U of T Alumni Association. Ecsedi left the telecommunications industry to serve as director of alumni relations for U of T Engineering from 2001 to 2006, and held the post of advisor to the dean on women’s issues during this time. The founding chair of both the PEO Women in Engineering Advisory Committee and the PEO Equity and Diversity Committee, she has been a leader in developing and implementing programs and policies to create equal opportunities for women in engineering. Ecsedi was the first chair of Women in Motion and one of the founders of the Go ENG Girl program.

About Bin Wu:

Bin Wu has made substantial contributions in developing medium-voltage (MV) drive technology, particularly in the creation of the world’s first transformerless MV drive – used to control and make more efficient electric motors. Over the past 20 years, many of his designs and innovations have had a lasting impact on MV drive technology, and he is currently working on developing the next generation MV drive. His work has resulted in 20 patents and an extensive publication record, including the book High Power Converters and AC Drives, which has been translated into Chinese and Persian. In addition to his significant technical contributions, Wu has provided exceptional service to his professional community, serving in leadership positions on technical committees and as an organizer for major international conferences and symposiums.

The Ontario Professional Engineers Awards recipients will be honoured at a gala at the International Centre in Mississauga on November 22, 2014. See the full list of 2014 winners.