The holidays are upon us, and as savvy shoppers search for gift ideas with a personal touch, wearable gadgets from U of T Engineering-developed companies are pret-a-porter for the fashionable tech lover on your list.
A motion-sensing glove for gamers? Check. Wristbands that let you make secure mobile payments? Check. This season, startups from U of T Engineering alumni are offering accessories to help improve your basketball game, smartwatch typing and more.
Below are just a few of the best wearable tech gifts from companies growing in the U of T Engineering community.
The Nymi from Bionym
This sleek, biometric wristband enables users to seamlessly unlock devices, remember passwords and—in a pilot with RBC in early 2015—even make 
mobile payments. And it does so securely, by recognizing your heart’s unique signature.
“We’re at the forefront of a revolution in identity-based interactions with devices and services,” said Karl Martin (ElecE 0T1, MASc 0T3, PhD 1T0), CEO of Bionym. “Our momentum continues to grow with the support of our investors and strategic partners.”
The company, which he co-founded with fellow alumnus Foteini Agrafioti (ElecE MASc 0T9, PhD 1T1), recently announced a round of $14 million in investment. A spin-off of their engineering research and developed through several university entrepreneurship supports, Bionym is now making headlines in the Washington Post, Mashable, Daily Mail and NBC.
You can reserve the Nymi for an introductory price of $79 on pre-orders before December 31. And ‘Nymi Band Discovery Kits,’ are also available, perfect for developers keen to create applications for a much buzzed-about piece of tech soon to hit the market.
Learn more about Bionym and Nymi.
Minuum from Whirlscape
It may not be a piece of wearable tech itself but this software makes smartwatches even smarter.
Minuum’s tiny, highly predictive keyboard offers accurate typing even when users miss every letter.
The company, developed by alumni Will Walmsley (MASc MIE 1T2) and Xavier Snelgrove (EngSci 1T1)with help from U of T accelerators UTEST and Creative Destruction Lab, blasted past its IndieGoGo goal by 873 per cent and has been producing minuscule keyboards for sloppy typers on a variety of devices ever since.
“While we hoped others would appreciate our project, we didn’t anticipate the level of support, enthusiasm and excitement that Minuum would generate around the world,” said Walmsley, CEO of Whirlscape.
The Minuum is available for devices running on iOS and Android and the company says it’s “the first keyboard to enable typing on Android Wear devices, including the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live,” among other smartwatches.
Minuum for iOS and Android costs $3.99. Consider it a virtual stocking stuffer.
SWISH by Onyx Motion
This free Android-wear smartphone app is made for basketball enthusiasts looking to track and improve their shot. SWISH records the shot and offers tips on focus, technique and more, with information sourced from real coaches.
Engineering alumni Jason Schuback (ECE 1T4), Vivek Kesarwani (EngSci 1T4), Marissa Wu (EngSci 1T3) and Kelvin Xu (EngSci 1T4) co-founded Onyx Motion as part of The Next 36, the entrepreneurship development program co-founded by Ajay Agrawal, Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship and academic director at U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab. Onyx Motion has just been named one of the newest UTEST companies. The free app is available for download in the Google Play store.
Learn more about Onyx Motion and SWISH.
ExoGlove from BreqLabs
The smart glove from U of T’s BreqLabs is poised to get gamers more immersed in their virtual worlds – and serve as a wearable mouse for users with mobility challenges such as hand tremors.
Engineering alumnus Martin Labrecque (CompE MASc 0T5, PhD 1T1) is developing the product with support from U of T’s Impact Centre and the Heffernan Commercialization Fellowship. In the video below, he demonstrates the ExoGlove in tandem with the Occulus Rift virtual reality headset and discusses other possible applications.
Learn more about BreqLabs and ExoGlove.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3NFciucp0Y]
In the decade since the genome was sequenced in 2003, scientists, engineers and doctors have struggled to answer an all-consuming question: Which DNA mutations cause disease?
A new computational technique developed at the University of Toronto may now be able to tell us.
A Canadian research team led by engineering and medicine professor Brendan Frey (ECE) has developed the first method for ‘ranking’ genetic mutations based on how living cells ‘read’ DNA, revealing how likely any given alteration is to cause disease. They used their method to discover unexpected genetic determinants of autism, hereditary cancers and spinal muscular atrophy, a leading genetic cause of infant mortality.
Their findings appear in today’s issue of the Science, a leading journal.
Think of the human genome as a mysterious text, made up of three billion letters. “Over the past decade, a huge amount of effort has been invested into searching for mutations in the genome that cause disease, without a rational approach to understanding why they cause disease,” said Frey. “This is because scientists didn’t have the means to understand the text of the genome and how mutations in it can change the meaning of that text.” Biologist Eric Lander of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured this puzzle in his famous quote: “Genome. Bought the book. Hard to read.”
What was Frey’s approach? We know that certain sections of the text, called exons, describe the proteins that are the building blocks of all living cells. What wasn’t appreciated until recently is that other sections, called introns, contain instructions for how to cut and paste exons together, determining which proteins will be produced. This ‘splicing’ process is a crucial step in the cell’s process of converting DNA into proteins, and its disruption is known to contribute to many diseases.
Most research into the genetic roots of disease has focused on mutations within exons, but increasingly scientists are finding that diseases can’t be explained by these mutations. Frey’s team took a completely different approach, examining changes to text that provides instructions for splicing, most of which is in introns.
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Read more in WIRED Magazine, Scientific American and the Globe and Mail.
Frey’s team used a new technology called ‘deep learning’ to teach a computer system to scan a piece of DNA, read the genetic instructions that specify how to splice together sections that code for proteins, and determine which proteins will be produced.
Unlike other machine learning methods, deep learning can make sense of incredibly complex relationships, such as those found in living systems in biology and medicine. “The success of our project relied crucially on using the latest deep learning methods to analyze the most advanced experimental biology data,” said Frey, whose team included members from University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Faculty of Medicine and the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, as well as Microsoft Research and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “My collaborators and our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are world-leading experts in these areas.”
Once they had taught their system how to read the text of the genome, Frey’s team used it to search for mutations that cause splicing to go wrong. They found that their method correctly predicted 94 percent of the genetic culprits behind well-studied diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and colorectal cancer, but more importantly, made accurate predictions for mutations that had never been seen before.
They then launched a huge effort to tackle a condition with complex genetic underpinnings: autism spectrum disorder. “With autism there are only a few dozen genes definitely known to be involved and these account for a small proportion of individuals with this condition,” said Frey.
In collaboration with Dr. Stephen Scherer, senior scientist and director of The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids and the University of Toronto McLaughlin Centre, Frey’s team compared mutations discovered in the whole genome sequences of children with autism, but not in controls. Following the traditional approach of studying protein-coding regions, they found no differences. However, when they used their deep learning system to rank mutations according to how much they change splicing, surprising patterns appeared.
“When we ranked mutations using our method, striking patterns emerged, revealing 39 novel genes having a potential role in autism susceptibility,” Frey said.
And autism is just the beginning—this mutation indexing method is ready to be applied to any number of diseases, and even non-disease traits that differ between individuals.
Dr. Juan Valcárcel Juárez, a researcher with the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in this research, says: “In a way it is like having a language translator: it allows you to understand another language, even if full command of that language will require that you also study the underlying grammar. The work provides important information for personalized medicine, clearly a key component of future therapies.”
U of T Engineering alumnus Michael Gray (CivE PhD 1T2) has a dream for the ideal city, and it’s built to the highest safety and aesthetic standards.
Now, he is setting those standards with Toronto-based startup Cast ConneX—a successful spin-off of graduate research performed under professors Jeffrey Packer and Constantin Christopoulos (both CivE)—co-founded with fellow alumnus Carlos de Oliveira (CivE MASc 0T6). Their company grew and benefited in part from support for de Oliveira’s research funded by the Heffernan Commercialization Fellowship, which is aimed at enabling graduate students to transfer their research into successful businesses. [Learn more about the Heffernan Commercialization Fellowships].
Cast ConneX designs steel castings that strengthen new and old buildings for earthquake resistance. In summer, 2013, the company began construction on two of its first major projects using the technology developed in Gray’s doctoral research: the Audain Art Museum in Whistler BC, and a retrofit for the St. Aubin High School in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec—the site of one of the worst recorded earthquakes in Canadian history.
They have also started several major projects in the United States, including the TransBay Center in San Francisco, CA and a new retractable roof for the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York.
Grounded in research, the dynamic startup constructs and retrofits for earthquake resistance, and their designs enable unique and novel structures. The company is setting its sights on new standards for design and safety.
Resisting seismic forces
“My PhD research at U of T was in developing a ‘Scorpion’, which is a high performance earthquake device that can also solve architectural problems,” said Gray.
Steel castings like the Scorpion are made by pouring liquid steel into molds, then letting it cool into a solid.
The most recent iteration of the Scorpion resembles a small ladder with fingers between the rungs [see cover image]. The connectors are installed at the end of a diagonal brace member that spans from one story to another. Those fingers transmit the brace load via bolts through their ends. If an earthquake strikes, the fingers are deformed in flexure, absorbing earthquake energy so that the building doesn’t have to.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAXpwimvbjA&w=560&h=315]
“What we do is unique because casting has been used for mechanical applications for a long time, but we’re among the first to use it in structural engineering. It’s attractive because of its potential for free form geometries, meaning you can construct non-traditional designs and unlikely angles,” said Gray.
Buildings are normally constructed using weld fabrication: support beams are cut from large, mass-produced steel plates and then welded together, which restricts the potential for interesting geometries and unique designs. This fabrication process creates challenges when designing for the devastating effects of earthquakes.
Weld fabrication can also be challenging in remote areas where tools and expertise are not readily available. In 2010, after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti and displaced approximately 1.5 million people, Cast ConneX donated their steel castings to enable the construction of an earthquake resistant school in Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital. The project was part of an industry-wide coalition to prepare the island nation for future natural disasters.
Architectural applications
In addition to earthquake resistance, Cast ConneX’s innovative steel castings enable unprecedented architectural designs. Structures like the Queen Richmond Centre (QRC) at Richmond and Peter Streets in Toronto, with its distinct Xs adding
architectural intrigue as well structural support.
“The architect came to us with designs, and we figured out how to make them work,” said Gray. “The connection joints that make the Xs at the QRC so distinctive also makes them virtually impossible under the restrictions of traditional construction techniques.”
In projects like the Queen Richmond Centre when custom castings are needed, Cast ConneX leverages their engineering expertise to help architects translate their designs to foundries—factories that produce metal castings. This casting technology opens the doors for shifts in the architecture of new buildings, creating opportunities for never before seen structures.
“Designers come to us with an idea, and we make it a reality,” said Gray.
Safety by design
In the future, Gray’s perfect city is built to the highest standards of safety and aesthetics.
“Safety is paramount,” said Gray. “In my ideal world, we’d have more motivation to push buildings to higher performance levels. Right now, all of our buildings are built to ‘code.’ We need to move beyond code minimum; we need to elevate our standards. And not just for safety, for design, too.”
Gray believes better management of our built environment is possible with intentional design and higher safety standards.
“Investing in our cities and structures is important, and it will pay off.”
U of T Engineering researchers have developed a paper-based diagnostic system for use in some of the world’s poorest countries. Awarded $112,000 by Grand Challenges Canada’s “Bold Ideas” initiative last month, the system is being touted for its potential impact on infant and maternal health in developing nations.
“Every hour, 11 infants are born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) and 18 children die of measles,” said researcher Alphonsus Ng (IBBME MASc 0T9, PhD Candidate), one of the lead designers of the technology.
Professor Aaron Wheeler (IBBME) and his team of researchers, including Ng, are developing a low-cost, portable system to detect measles and rubella infection status and immunity.
Using a small machine called the DropBot, health practitioners can run four concurrent tests on one droplet of blood. They insert a thin strip of paper, approximately one inch wide by three inches long, into a testing platform. Printed for less than a dollar by a standard ink jet printer, the paper has an innovative circuit-like design that actually generates light once the machine digitally manipulates the blood sample. The whole process takes 35 minutes.
In some of the world’s poorest nations, those 35 minutes could have life-changing impact.
Rubella—sometimes referred to as “German measles”—can be passed by pregnant mothers to their unborn children with devastating effects that can include severe developmental problems, blindness and stillborn births. The WHO estimates that approximately 110,000 children are born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) every year—but that statistic does not account for the number of women who miscarry or experience other pregnancy-ending complications from the disease.
“Vaccinating children is great,” explained Ng. “But the entire population still needs to be monitored, because there will still be vulnerable segments of the population, and that can lead to serious health risks.”
In the next 18 months, the team plans to test their technology on 200 patient samples in Vietnam.
“Vietnam is a hotspot for measles and rubella because they don’t have a common rubella vaccination yet,“ said Ng.
It’s also a country in dire need of diagnostic resources: Vietnam has only two diagnostic labs, one in the south and one in the north. Introducing a rapid, economical field diagnostic tool could have an enormous impact on this country of 97 million and lead to better-informed public health policies.
Testing the technology in the field will also allow the team to work on fine-tuning the technology specifically for the poorest nations.
“It costs us maybe a dollar to print the [paper] test chips, but printing these in an industrial setting would cut costs by another order of magnitude,” explained Ryan Fobel (IBBME PhD Candidate), one of the innovators behind the DropBot.
The team is also looking at ways to cut the cost of manufacturing the DropBot machine to a few hundred dollars, which would put the technology into far more hands, and potentially allow everything to be manufactured within the host country, generating local jobs.
“This is a great opportunity to bring digital microfluidics out into the field to address a real world problem,” said Wheeler. “I am proud to be working with such a motivated, enthusiastic team.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDgAV7tOx0A]
James Milton Ham (ElecE 4T3), the 10th president of the University of Toronto and former Dean of Engineering, was posthumously selected for induction into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. Ham was a leading Canadian engineer and a public servant who made enormous contributions to the safety of Canada’s mining and metallurgy industries and the development of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Ontario.
The Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame is a central part of the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. It honours individuals whose outstanding scientific or technological achievements have had long-term implications for Canadians. Ham will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on January 20, 2015.
James Ham was an alumnus of U of T’s Electrical Engineering program, graduating with the highest marks ever awarded in the Faculty at that time. After graduation, he served in WWII in the Royal Canadian Navy. He joined U of T Engineering in 1953. Ham served as chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1964-66 and as dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering from 1966-73. He was dean of the School of Graduate Studies from 1976-78 and served as president of the University of Toronto from 1978-83. He was appointed President Emeritus in 1988.
As President, Ham spearheaded an effort to make universities centres for research and innovation—an idea we take for granted today. Ham chaired a special committee on university research, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Universities. His report proposed that research should become the centrepiece of Ontario’s economic development strategy and that this research should be based in universities. The Centres of Excellence program was developed in response to this report.
After his term as President, Ham helped to found the Canadian Academy of Engineering, for which he served as President from 1990-91. He was also a founding member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Perhaps Ham’s most influential contribution was as the author of the “Ham Commission Report” on health and safety in the mining industry. The report of this commission was the impetus for the creation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1978.
In 1989, Ham was inducted into the Order of Ontario. In 1980, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of his achievements as a “scientist, engineer and scholar who has had a distinguished academic and administrative career”.
“Professor James Ham applied his engineering competencies to the benefit of his field, his university, his province and his country, changing them all for the better”, said Dean Cristina Amon. “His career is an inspiring example of the extraordinary impact engineers can have as leaders and public servants.”
Originally published in the 2014 issue of ANNUM Magazine.
A single unpruned tree was all it took.
On Aug. 14, 2003, one hot day in a hot summer, a power line sagged onto some branches in the small village of Walton Hills, Ohio. The resulting cascading failure throughout Ontario and the northeastern United States shut down power to more than 10 million people, becoming the second-most-widespread blackout in history and a major wake-up call for power generators and electric utilities operators around the world.
The grid has gotten a lot smarter since then, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “The building-up of intelligence on our network will continue to go forward forever—there will never be an end,” says Charles Esendal, manager of research, development and demonstration for Hydro One. “It’s not a destination, it’s a journey.”
Helping accelerate that journey are professors Reza Iravani, Zeb Tate and Josh Taylor. Each is collaborating with Hydro One on a project to make Hydro One’s network more robust for the 21st century, by improving power-system stability and monitoring, use of energy storage, and integration of distributed energy resources, including intermittent renewable generation such as wind and solar power.
The three projects launched in 2014 and will run for two years under the guidance of a steering committee composed of Esendal and Birendra Singh from Hydro One, ECE Chair Professor Farid Najm, and professors Reza Iravani and Peter Lehn.
Islands in the Storm
The current grid’s interconnectivity, a strength when all runs smoothly, becomes a liability in adverse conditions—Americans witnessed this after Hurricane Sandy blasted the northeastern U.S. in October 2012, shutting down vast swaths of the system. As severe and unpredictable weather events increase in frequency, the ability to isolate and operate sections of the grid independently and sustainably is a high priority.
“If some event happens upstream in the system and you get disconnected, you become an electrical island,” says Professor Iravani, who has had much successful collaboration with Hydro One and its predecessor, Ontario Hydro, since 1991. “We should be able to operate these islands in order to provide resiliency to the system, so it doesn’t completely shut down—it should be self-sustaining.” Professor Iravani is validating methods for isolating and controlling subsections of the grid within the larger system, and integrating renewable energy sources into these microgrids. Others have experimentally demonstrated this kind of microgrid islanding, but nothing has been validated and implemented on a larger scale.
The good news: all the essential elements of islanded microgrids—distributed resources, loads, transmission and monitoring infrastructure—are already in place on Hydro One’s network. The challenge is to control them effectively, whether they’re functioning as part of the whole or on their own.
“The components are there, but the point is to provide enough intelligence, decision-making and control for that mode of operation,” says Professor Iravani. “All the components should be individually controlled, and all the controls should be coordinated to enable unified operation of the system. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
The Great Green Unknown
We all know fossil fuels aren’t cheap, clean or abundant—but what are we doing about it? Plenty, it turns out—the high market penetration of solar generation from individual consumers, and the uptick in electric vehicles in need of a charge are introducing unknowns into the grid on both the supply and demand sides.
“It is great to be able to say ‘Let’s use the sun’s rays or the wind to generate electricity,’ but it’s very transient in nature,” says Esendal. “You cannot predict the trend at all, and that is the worst thing that you can have on the grid. The system requires accurate anticipation and prediction to be able to plan and dispatch the electricity where the need is. Unfortunately that is a major challenge in integration of renewable generation.”
What if you could bottle up some of that wind or sunlight for later, and redistribute it when need is high? “The most basic constraint on the power system is that supply must equal demand,” says Professor Taylor. “Renewables make the supply random, but storage can make it controllable—the question is how best to do that.”
Conventional storage meant pumping water up a hill and releasing it, converting potential to kinetic energy to make electricity—though it sounds old-fashioned, the method is quite efficient, but expensive and geographically restrictive. Professor Taylor is looking at both batteries and flywheels for more flexible, distributed storage and is developing an algorithm to make smart decisions about optimal locations and conditions to either store or release energy.
Ready for Anything
When a line overheats due to excessive current, as in the great blackout of August 2003, the power transferred by that line needs to be redirected, and utilities operators need to “reposition” the system in order to maintain stability. “In 2003 they didn’t know the lines were out, so they didn’t know they needed to reposition the system,” says Professor Tate. Operators learned the hard way that accurate information is everything, and afterward deployed much more sophisticated monitoring methods.
Professor Tate is working on a project to use these smarter monitors, called synchrophasors, to detect faults in the grid and automate rapid responses. Synchrophasors sample and relay magnitude and phase data between 30 and 60times per second, a vast improvement on old sensors that are polled only once every two to three seconds. “This gives you a much better idea of how power is flowing immediately, so you can tell whether a line is disconnected or a generator is down,” he says. “Improving detection fosters efficiency—you don’t have to run the system as conservatively if you know you can react instantly.”
“There are a lot of challenges today—these are only a few issues that we have,” says Esendal. “It will take some time to validate all of these technologies, but we needed to start somewhere and I think University of Toronto is in a great position, not only from the expertise perspective, but also to be located just in our backyard—it’s a great advantage.”
If all goes according to plan, you’ll never know how these projects turn out—you’ll just be cozy during the next deluge of freezing rain, cool throughout the sweltering summer, and connected in the next flood, hurricane or hail storm. And soon August 2003 will be just another unbelievable anecdote of times long past.
ANNUM Magazine is an annual publication from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.