The CBC’s The Nature of Things recently explored nanotechnology and all its potential in saving the planet.

Nanotechnology is a universe where scientists explore matter on a scale 80,000 times smaller than a human hair. It’s a gigantic global laboratory where scientists converge from all disciplines, and dedicate themselves to observing and manipulating the smallest particles in the natural world.

Professor Ted Sargent (ECE) sees a future where nano-particles applied to solar cells transform the way we capture energy. “The imaginative possibilities that emerge when you make low-cost, flexible and high-efficiency solar cells, are really limitless,” explained Professor  Sargent, a Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology.

In June 2011, Professor Sargent and his research team discovered a new solar cell that may pave the way to inexpensive coatings that efficiently convert the sun’s rays to electricity.

Watch the episode online , or see it on CBC News Network on November 10.

Making medical devices that address the challenge of delivering safe care to patients is standard procedure at the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME). Just ask Professor Paul Santerre, IBBME Director, who developed Endexo Technology through his spin-off company, Interface Biologics Inc (IBI).

In July, IBI announced that the largest provider of dialysis products, Fresenius Medical Care, would apply the company’s Endexo Technology to dialysis circuits for treating end-stage renal disease.

Now, Navilyst Medical has launched BioFlo, a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) that uses Endexo in five clinical centres in Canada. The U.S. will launch BioFlo in early 2012.

Endexo is a self-locating fluoro-oligomeric additive that reduces platelet adhesion and activation, protein adsorption and thrombus formation. Endexo is present on all surfaces of the BioFlo PICC and remains present for the life of the catheter. It also reduces the need for anti-coagulants, such as herapin, which patients may adversely react to, or antibiotics that may be associated with bacterial resistance.

“Endexo products are now in young neonatal children at Canadian hospitals, including the Ottawa Civic Hospital and other centres in Canada,” said Professor Santerre. “Interface Biologics is only one of the 16 current IBBME start-up companies. Imagine the impact that awaits the healthcare market from this great Institute.”

Technology transfer is a priority at IBBME. With the assistance of MaRS, the Centre for the Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, and the U of T Innovations and Partnership Office, innovative technologies and processes are brought out of the lab and into the hospital. Techna, a new University Health Network-University of Toronto healthcare technologies commercialization initiative that launches next week, will also help bridge the gap between research and the clinical application of technologies.

For more information, visit the IBBME website.

Professor Torstein A. Utigard (MSE) was named a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum (CIM) at the 50th Anniversary Conference of Metallurgists (COM2011) awards banquet, held in Montréal on October 3. CIM’s Fellowship Program recognizes members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the mining, metallurgical, or petroleum industries. Professor Utigard was one of eight fellows inducted this year.

Professor Utigard is the holder of the Gerald R. Heffernan Chair in Materials Processing at the University of Toronto. He has established an international reputation as an outstanding researcher in the science and technology of pyrometallurgical processing of non-ferrous metals. With over 150 publications, 11 patents and three others pending, Professor Utigard has pioneered numerous developments pertaining to the physical chemistry aspects of metals refining. He has supervised close to 40 researchers, played a major role within professional societies and facilitated international collaborations between industry and academia. In the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and through many short courses in industry and various symposia, Professor Utigard has trained numerous undergraduate and graduate students as well as engineers and operators in the areas of mineral processing, thermodynamics, kinetics and extraction of metals. In all of these activities, he has been an ambassador par excellence for the engineering profession.

In the same evening, Professor Utigard was also recognized with the Best Paper Award, Non-Ferrous Pyrometallurgy category, for a paper titled “Fluid Bed Roasting of Nickel-Copper Matte,” published in the Canadian Metallurgical Quarterly (Vol. 49, No.2 pp.lSS-162, 2010).

“I am very happy that Professor Utigard’s many years of sustained excellence in research and teaching is being recognized by the CIM,” says Professor Jun Nogami, Chair of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. “I hope that all of our faculty members, as well as the generations of alumni that he has taught and advised will join me in congratulating him.”

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) has awarded a five-year, $5 million grant to establish the NSERC Strategic Network in Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI). The new network, which will be based at the University of Toronto and led by Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia (ECE), will foster innovative application platforms, create new job opportunities in the computing and communications sectors and allow Canadians to share digital information quicker and easier. Professor Leon-Garcia and a team of 15 researchers at nine universities were awarded the grant to advance Canada’s position as an international leader in information technology. Five postdoctoral fellows each year and nearly 50 graduate students will support their efforts.

“We are thankful to NSERC for the support provided to develop this important research network,” said Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “Under the remarkable leadership of Professor Alberto Leon-Garcia, SAVI will provide the focal point for creating and expanding Canada’s virtual computing and networking infrastructure.”

The new network is also supported by nearly 20 industry and public sector partners, including IBM Canada, MTS Allstream, Telus, Ericsson Canada, Cisco and Juniper, which will provide $3.5-million over five years. Together they will foster growth in the sector by developing a skilled workforce, help Canadian companies grow and create made-in-Canada applications that will encourage businesses to adopt and adapt to the growing use of these platforms. SAVI has developed a unique approach to transfer research into practice with half of the network’s graduate students working on long-term projects while the other half focus on related, but shorter-term projects as interns in industry.

“[SAVI] will help us invest in Canadian projects that will create technological leadership that is invaluable, and strengthen the nation’s information and communications technology base,” said Professor Leon-Garcia, who is also Canada Research Chair in Autonomic Service Architecture. Application platforms include the software and computing and network infrastructure that allow individuals to access applications and to share information and data through a range of devices, from smart phones, to portable computers and cameras. They also help governments and communities support participatory sensing, where individuals and communities can systematically collect and analyze data for use in discovery in areas such as health and wellness, education, or community-sustainable practices.

Current application platforms typically rely on data centres located far away from where they are most used. Professor Leon-Garcia’s team is developing the notion of extended cloud computing that combine distant data centres with a smart edge network located closer to where they are used, reducing latencies when sharing and receiving information, and ensuring responsiveness in time-critical applications.

The aim is to build an extended cloud that will support bandwidth-rich and highly responsive applications for highly mobile users. For example, imagine a Blue Jays game where fans, reporters and pundits are sharing their insight and commentary using a variety of media (videos, audio and pictures). The technology, realizing a surge of data traffic in one area, will automatically allocate computing and network resources to the stadium and surrounding area to increase traffic, computing and storage capabilities, all the while ensuring emergency personnel continue to have their reliable communications. This type of technology will not only provide consumers with more capable apps but will also increase energy efficiency.

The SAVI Network will also develop a national test bed to support experimentation in future Internet protocols and architecture.

The network will also facilitate training opportunities for others in the field and increase graduate students’ interest in the network’s research. An annual design competition for fourth-year students will be launched and the network will introduce an internship program to serve as a bridge in the transfer of technology to industry.

The funding for SAVI was provided through NSERC’s Strategic Network Grants program, which aims to accelerate research in support of the federal government’s science and technology priorities. In announcing today’s funding, NSERC President Suzanne Fortier stated that networks like SAVI, “… exemplify NSERC’s goal of connecting and applying the strength of the academic research system to addressing the opportunities and challenges of building prosperity for our country.”

Details on the announcement are available on NSERC’s website.

Associate Professor Parham Aarabi (ECE) has become a beauty maven with ModiFace, a $30 million virtual makeover business, where users try out cosmetics, wedding gowns and plastic surgery for free online.

Beauty is perhaps an unintuitive market for an engineer to pursue, but as he discovered, it’s not such a bad fit.

Associate Professor Aarabi, who is a Canada Research Chair in Internet Video, Audio and Image Search, was determined to make the ideal visualization tool: one that could take a 2D image and show a 3D effect, like a face lift or lip filler, in real-time. He researched for an intense eight months, meeting more than 100 surgeons.

Two years later, Botox and facial fillers Juvederm and Restylane were using ModiFace. The next year, Oxygen, a lifestyle channel, and Hearst signed on.

A ModiFace app generally works like this: users upload a photo and alter it by applying makeup or administering plastic surgery.

Sounds simple, but there are two technical challenges. The first is facial recognition. An app must be able detect an eye, for example, so makeup isn’t accidentally applied on an eyeball.

Associate Professor Aarabi and his engineers coded a “neural network,” a computer model that works like a simplified human brain, and trained it to identify facial features.

The second challenge is coding graphics that replicate the colour and texture of makeup — glossy, sparkly, matte or otherwise — onscreen. The codes behind facial recognition and colour graphics are the bulk of ModiFace’s patents.

To read the full article, visit the Toronto Star.

Researchers in the University of Toronto’s Department of Materials Science & Engineering have developed the world’s most efficient organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on plastic. This result enables a flexible form factor, not to mention a less costly, alternative to traditional OLED manufacturing, which currently relies on rigid glass.

The results are reported online in the latest issue of Nature Photonics .

OLEDs provide high-contrast and low-energy displays that are rapidly becoming the dominant technology for advanced electronic screens. They are already used in some cell phone and other smaller-scale applications.

Current state-of-the-art OLEDs are produced using heavy-metal doped glass in order to achieve high efficiency and brightness, which makes them expensive to manufacture, heavy, rigid and fragile.

“For years, the biggest excitement behind OLED technologies has been the potential to effectively produce them on flexible plastic,” says Materials Science & Engineering Professor Zheng-Hong Lu, the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Organic Optoelectronics.

Using plastic can substantially reduce the cost of production, while providing designers with a more durable and flexible material to use in their products.

The research, which was supervised by Professor Lu and led by PhD Candidates Zhibin Wang and Michael G. Helander, demonstrated the first high-efficiency OLED on plastic. The performance of their device is comparable with the best glass-based OLEDs, while providing the benefits offered by using plastic.

“This discovery, unlocks the full potential of OLEDs, leading the way to energy-efficient, flexible and impact-resistant displays,” says Professor Lu.

Wang and Helander were able to re-construct the high-refractive index property previously limited to heavy metal-doped glass by using a 50-100 nanometre thick layer of tantalum(V) oxide (Ta2O5), an advanced optical thin-film coating material. This advanced coating technique, when applied on flexible plastic, allowed the team to build the highest-efficiency OLED device ever reported with a glass-free design.

The team was recently featured on SPIE.org, the international society for optics and photonics.