University Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, BME, Donnelly) has been named one of the Top 100 most powerful women in Canada by Women’s Executive Network (WXN). The list recognizes the country’s highest achieving female leaders in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.
“It is a great honour to be included among this group of game-changing, successful people, and even more wonderful to share this award with women leaders across Canada,” says Shoichet. “Growing up with ‘girl power,’ and a fantastic role model in my mother, Dorothy Shoichet, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to forge new paths and have these be recognized.”
In addition to being named one of the country’s most powerful women, Shoichet was also recently awarded Canada’s top science prize, the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.
Conducting research at the intersection of engineering, chemistry and biology, Shoichet and her team is world-renowned for their innovative use of 3D hydrogels. The biomaterial has enabled drug discoveries for breast and brain cancer, as well as a rare lung disease. Shoichet’s lab also focuses on regenerative medicine strategies to promote repair of the brain after stroke and overcoming blindness.
Shoichet has been a longstanding advocate for women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), as well as a leading voice in the advancement of science and engineering knowledge within Canada. After being named the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Laureate in 2015, she contributed the cash award towards establishing the Dorothy Shoichet Women Faculty of Excellence Award. Named in honour of her mother, the award aims to support pre-tenure women faculty and increase the proportion of women science professors at the University by providing teaching relief — literally buying time for faculty to focus on research.
Shoichet has advised both federal and provincial governments through her service on Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council and the Ontario Research Innovation Council. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Senior Advisor to the President on Science & Engineering Engagement at the University of Toronto. She is the co-founder of Research2Reality, which uses social media to promote innovative research across the country. She also served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist, with a mandate to advance science and innovation in the province.
Shoichet is the only person to be elected a fellow of all three of Canada’s National Academies and is a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Society — the oldest and most prestigious academic society.
Shoichet also holds the distinction of University Professor, a title held by less than two percent of the faculty at the University of Toronto. In 2017, she was awarded the Killam Prize in Engineering. She is a member of the Order of Ontario and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
“This recognition is a testament to Professor Shoichet’s enormous influence and impact in research and science advocacy, not only within Canada but around the world,” says Chris Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering. “On behalf of the Faculty, I extend my congratulations to Molly on being named one of the most powerful women in Canada, and for being such an inspiration to our engineering and science community.”
Professor Tim Barfoot (UTIAS) has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Society, for contributions to mobile robot navigation.
“I am very grateful to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for this honour,” said Barfoot.
“As a kid building my first robots of out Lego, I could never have imagined where this field and career would take me. It’s been a lot of fun so far and I’m excited to see where robotics goes next. I would like to thank all those that helped me along the way through Engineering Science, MDA, and UTIAS, and I would like to dedicate this honour to another IEEE Fellow, Professor Bruce Francis (1947-2018), who served as an influential mentor to me,” he said.
The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
Professor Barfoot’s research is focused on advancing the visual navigation of mobile robots. Such robots are used in many different sectors, including transportation, planetary exploration, mining, warehouses, offices, and military applications.
One of his team’s innovations is a technique known as “visual teach and repeat.” This method enables a robot equipped with a visual device to record information about its surroundings while being driven by a human operator along a known safe route. Afterward, specialized algorithms enable the robot to compare its own location to that of the previously taught route and adjust its actions to stay on the right path.
Barfoot has more than 160 publications in scientific journals and conferences, and has published a monograph, State Estimation for Robotics (2017, Cambridge University Press). He is an Associate Director of the University of Toronto Robotics Institute and Chair of the Robotics Option offered by the Division of Engineering Science. He is also, along with Professor Angela Schoellig (UTIAS) one of the two co-Faculty Leads of aUToronto, a self-driving car design team that has placed first in the international SAE/GM AutoDrive Challenge for the last three years in a row.
Barfoot is a double alumnus of U of T Engineering (EngSci 9T6+PEY, UTIAS PhD 0T2) and first joined the Faculty as a professor in 2007 at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. He has also spent time working on advanced autonomous systems at Apple and MDA, and as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford.
“Training robots to navigate safely and autonomously is among the most complex engineering challenges of our time, and Professor Barfoot’s embodies the world-leading advances we are making in this area,” said Chris Damaren, Director of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“On behalf of the entire Institute, I warmly congratulate him on this well-deserved honour.”
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.
As cars keep getting smarter, automation is taking many tricky tasks — from parallel parking to backing up — out of drivers’ hands.
Now, a U of T Engineering study is underscoring the importance of drivers keeping their eyes on the road — even when they are in an automated vehicle (AV).
Using an AV driving simulator and eye-tracking equipment, Professor Birsen Donmez (MIE) and her team studied two types of in-vehicle displays and their effects on the driving behaviours of 48 participants.
The findings, published recently in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, revealed that drivers can become over-reliant on AV technology. This was especially true with a type of in-vehicle display the team coined as takeover request and automation capability (TORAC).
A “takeover request” asks the driver to take vehicle control when automation is not able to handle a situation; “automation capability” indicates how close to that limit the automation is.
“Drivers find themselves in situations where, although they are not actively driving, they are still part of the driving task — they must be monitoring the vehicle and step in if the vehicle fails,” says Donmez.
“And these vehicles fail, it’s just guaranteed. The technology on the market right now is not mature enough to the point where we can just let the car drive and we go to sleep. We are not at that stage yet.”
Tesla’s AV system, for example, warns drivers every 30 seconds or less when their hands aren’t detected on the wheel. This prompt can support driver engagement to some extent, but when the automation fails, driver attention and anticipation are the key factors that determine whether or not you get into a traffic accident.
“Even though cars are advertised right now as self-driving, they are still just Level 2, or partially automated,” adds Dengbo He (MIE) postdoctoral fellow and lead author. “The driver should not rely on these types of vehicle automation.”
In one of the team’s driving scenarios, the participants were given a non-driving, self-paced task — meant to mimic common distractions such as reading text messages — while takeover prompts and automation capability information were turned on.
“Their monitoring of the road went way down compared to the condition where these features were turned off,” says Donmez. “Automated vehicles and takeover requests can give people a false sense of security, especially if they work most of the time. People are going to end up looking away and doing something non-driving related.”
The researchers also tested a second in-vehicle display system that added information on surrounding traffic to the data provided by the TORAC system, called STTORAC. These displays showed more promise in ensuring driving safety.
STTORAC provides drivers with ongoing information about their surrounding driving environment, including highlighting potential traffic conflicts on the road. This type of display led to the shortest reaction time in scenarios where drivers had to take over control of the vehicle, showing a significant improvement from both the TORAC and the no-display conditions.
“When you’re not driving and aren’t engaged, it’s easy to lose focus. Adding information on surrounding traffic kept drivers better engaged in monitoring and anticipating traffic conflicts,” says He, adding that the key takeaway for designers of next-generation AVs is to ensure systems are designed to keep drivers attentive. “Drivers should not be distracted, at least at this stage.”
Donmez’s team will next look at the effects of non-driving behaviours on drowsiness while operating an AV. “If someone isn’t engaged in a non-driving task and is just monitoring the road, they can be more likely to fall into states of drowsiness, which is even more dangerous than being distracted.”
Professor Cristina Amon (MIE), Alumni Distinguished Professor in Bioengineering and Dean Emerita of U of T Engineering, has been named a Member of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honours. The new appointees were announced today by Governor General Julie Payette (ECE MASc 9T0).
A distinguished scholar in mechanical engineering, devoted educator, innovative academic leader and university administrator, Amon served as Dean of U of T Engineering from 2006 to 2019. During that time, she established the Faculty as a world leader in multidisciplinary engineering research and education while making incredible strides in advancing gender equity, diversity and inclusion.
Under Amon’s leadership, the international profile of U of T Engineering and Canadian engineering programs in general rose tremendously; the Faculty is now acknowledged as one of the world’s top public engineering schools in all international rankings. This is in large part due to her unwavering commitment to creating innovative educational programming, establishing structures to ensure student success, fostering multidisciplinary research and strong partnerships with industry, and promoting Canadian engineering internationally.
“The Order of Canada recognizes those who devote themselves to enriching the fabric of this great country, and I am therefore tremendously proud to be honoured with this appointment,” said Amon. “My inclusion also acknowledges the vital role of excellence in research and education as the engine of Canada’s innovation economy, critical to the future prosperity of this country. I am enormously gratified that today we can stand proudly alongside world leaders on the global stage.”
Amon’s research pioneered the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics and hierarchical modeling for thermal design subject to multidisciplinary competing constraints. She has made ground-breaking contributions to concurrent thermal designs, innovation in electronics cooling, optimization algorithms for renewable energy, design of biomedical devices and, most recently, transient thermal management of electrical vehicle batteries and chargers.
Cristina Amon has served the engineering profession with distinction and dedication. She was the founding Chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council and Chair of the Research Committee for the National Council of Deans of Engineering and Applied Science, and has served in numerous leadership and committee roles both in Canada and abroad.
Amon has been inducted into the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Royal Academy of Spain, Royal Society of Canada, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of all the professional and technical societies in her field. She has received the highest recognitions for Canadian engineers, including the Engineering Institute of Canada Sir John Kennedy Medal and the Engineers Canada Gold Medal.
“It is impossible to overstate the contributions Cristina has made to enhancing the student experience, catalysing trans-disciplinary research collaboration, and strengthening the vibrant community in this Faculty,” said Chris Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering and the inaugural holder of the Decanal Chair in Innovation. “This Order of Canada acknowledges her lasting legacy of excellence at U of T Engineering, and her impact across the engineering profession.”
“Years ago, I made the choice to pursue my life’s work in Canada, a country that values and celebrates the diversity of cultures, backgrounds, abilities and perspectives of each one of its people,” said Amon. “It is deeply meaningful for me to receive this award in recognition of my own contributions to advancing that diversity and inclusion, and to creating new opportunities for generations yet to come.”
Six months ago, Shrey Jain (Year 2 EngSci) was a first-year engineering student who just wanted to do his part to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. He could never have imagined that doing so would take him halfway around the world, into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia.
“It’s been really amazing to see the realness of it, the tangible outcomes we can have by applying what we know about gathering and analyzing data,” says Jain.
Back in March, as the world awoke to the threat posed by the pandemic, Jain led a team of volunteers in an initiative that would become known as flatten, as in “flattening the curve.”
Their first project was a real-time heatmap of potential and confirmed COVID-19 cases in Toronto, created from self-reported, anonymized data via screening questions developed in consultation with public health officials.
Within days, flatten had garnered national headlines, and the team was fielding calls from public health officials who wanted to work with them.
“We had collaborated with the City of Montreal and other public health bodies in Canada,” says Jain. “That was great, but what we really wanted to do was use our tool in a way that would lead to concrete changes in policy.”
The opportunity came when the team was contacted by Dr. Ian Furst, a Canadian oral and maxillofacial surgeon who is also CEO of the Swisscross Foundation, which provides access to high quality healthcare for victims of war.
Via a group called Global Women Leaders, Furst had been working with Dr. Hodan Ali, a Senior Advisor to the mayor of Mogadishu and a key member of the Durable Solutions Unit, part of the local Benadir Regional Administration (BRA).
“Our models indicated that social measures could be key to reducing the spread, but they needed to be guided by information on disease prevalence,” says Furst. “Since Mogadishu had little access to testing, we thought that tracking the disease via symptom surveillance might be possible. The flatten project was an exact match to what Hodan and I thought might help.”
Adapting the tools that flatten had developed for Mogadishu meant building and drafting a new set of screening questions, but it also required a new approach to deal with challenges related to access and use of the technology.
“In Mogadishu, not everybody has a smartphone, and internet access can be unreliable,” says Jain. “To get robust, valuable data, we realized that we needed people to mediate the collection process.”
Funding from the European Union and the United Nations Development Program enabled the BRA to provide stipends for 400 local volunteers to survey citizens across the city for two months.
Using customized tools created by flatten, these volunteers gathered data on COVID-19 symptoms and other public health parameters from more than 115,000 people, including many living in Internally Displaced Persons camps. Throughout the data collection process, members of the flatten team were responsible for data monitoring, cleaning and quality assurance.
Insights extracted from this data informed practical strategies that have already been implemented in the city by the BRA, including rapid emergency shelters in areas where household overpopulation was identified as a risk factor, and 205 wash stations set up in districts where hand hygiene was a key need.
Other key findings of the project included a recognition that health literacy and income were key factors affecting both testing and infection, and the BRA is working to develop programs to address these needs.
Jain says that the flatten technical team as well as the multidisciplinary advisory team were key to the success of the project. Members included:
- U of T Assistant Professor Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi (Department of Computer Science and Department of Medicine), Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning for Health and Canada CIFAR AI Chair
- Professor Leo Anthony Celi, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School
- Marie-Laure Charpignon, PhD candidate at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS)
- Mathew Samuel, Data Scientist at Facebook
- Nick Frosst, Founder of Cohere.AI and a former researcher at Google Brain
Going forward, Jain hopes the project can serve as a model for anyone interested in leveraging the power of big data to improve public health in resource–constrained settings.
“With this international collaboration, we have set a precedent for data collection in Sub-Saharan Africa, and demonstrated that even a small start-up like flatten can make a positive difference globally,” says Jain.
“We’re already talking to academics who work in global health about further anonymizing and characterizing this dataset, and using it to promote open science research in public health. This approach can continue providing beneficial insights to humanitarian aid organizations, like the BRA.”
Furst also sees a lot of potential for the tools that flatten has developed.
“Imagine a nimble, scalable, mobile system that captures and organizes humanitarian health needs so that local healthcare workers can act on them, but also match them to organizations in a position to help,” he says. “I think that would make a big difference, and flatten is the first step toward that dream.”
Margaux Roncière (Year 1 TrackOne) may have just begun her studies at U of T Engineering, but Roncière is already well on her way to becoming a leader in the community.
Roncière is among four U of T undergraduate students and 36 recipients across Canada to receive the Loran Award this year. The award, valued at $100,000 over the course of four years, recognizes students who, in addition to academic achievement, have demonstrated their character and made positive changes in their communities.
Offered to students in their final year of high school, Loran Scholars must maintain a minimum cumulative grade point average of 85 per cent. However, what makes this award unique is its emphasis on character and the belief that “integrity, courage, grit and personal autonomy are better indicators of overall potential than standard academic measures.”
Diagne, Mitchell, Thompson and Roncière faced stiff competition for the Loran Award, having been selected from a pool of more than 5,000 students.
Roncière published a book in high school about an international co-operation project that aimed to develop female leadership in Senegal. She also worked on humanitarian projects in Benin and Nepal.
Now at U of T Engineering, Roncière wants to continue pursuing innovative solutions to humanitarian crises. She says she was drawn to U of T’s engineering program because its “outstanding reputation demonstrates its quality of education and its commitment to innovate.”
“I’m particularly interested in sustainability and social impact, and I believe technology can be a great lever for that,” says Roncière, who is from Dorval, Que.
Roncière was a member of her school’s United Nations club and several student committees. As a first-year engineering student, she is pursuing projects that focus on tackling global development and social and systemic change.
“I joined the Engineers without Borders chapter on Indigenous Reconciliation,” Roncière says.
“In the future, I’d also like to get more involved in policy and mental health advocacy, especially within the engineering faculty.”