A group of University of Toronto students have designed a social networking platform that they believe will save time and prevent aggravation among students.
uBuddy, designed by Engineering student Charles Qu, is the first academic social networking platform that allows students to effectively facilitate note-sharing, meetings and course discussions online. “It brings all those features together,” said uBuddy Communications Director Ryan McDougall. “It’s built by students for the students.”
McDougall said that since the official launching of uBuddy last week they have already hit 1,000 registered users and the group has plans to add more.
Currently, uBuddy is available exclusively to U of T students, but McDougall said the networking site will spread. “We plan on opening the platform to other campuses,” McDougall said.
First-year students in large classes wanting to meet people to form study groups, or simply make friends, will get the most of the social networking platform.
Follow the link to read the full article and see a photo on Metronews.ca.
Most people have never been up close to a natural gas processing plant, an oil sands operation or a large wind turbine. Yet the energy sector fuels not only Alberta’s prosperity, but also drives the country’s economic engine. Continued innovation in this sector is vital for Canada to remain globally competitive, to ensure a strong, environmentally sustain- able economy for Canadians now and in the future.
But it will take a new way of innovating to find solutions to large challenges such as climate change, or ‘greening’ oil sands production, or making our cities more energy efficient. Universities can and must play a leading in engineering, geoscience, business and other disciplines, and expand our interdisciplinary research and teaching in energy and environment. Here are three examples:
Researchers and graduate students at the University of Calgary are working with those at the University of Toronto–including Professor Heather MacLean (CivE)–along with industry and government partners, on the Life Cycle Assessment of Oil Sands Technology project. It will produce the first comprehensive picture of the economy-wide impacts of current and proposed oil sands operations – a standard that companies can then use to reliably measure their total environmental footprint.
In the Wabamun Area Sequestration Project (WASP), engineers, geoscientists, lawyers and social scientists explored a wide range of issues that must be resolved before carbon emissions can be safely captured from Alberta’s coal-fired power plants and permanently stored underground. Insights from WASP not only identified critical areas needing research, they informed investment and policy decisions by industry and government.
A ‘micro-grid’ electricity system on the Burnaby campus of British Columbia Institute of Technology could be the catalyst for major changes in power distribution at BC Hydro.
BCIT and research partners, including the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, share $5 million in federal funding awarded last week by science and technology minister of state Gary Goodyear to ramp up the technical institute’s smart-grid research program. ECE’s Professor Reza Iravani is one of three team leaders on the project.
When New York artist Wafaa Bilal visited Toronto recently, he got together with inventor Steve Mann to compare notes on mounting cameras on their heads. Then they jumped into Mann’s hot tub to play some music.
Bilal, an Iraqi who has lived in the United States since 1991, is a performance artist who hopes to spend 2011 streaming photographs from the camera he had surgically implanted in the back of his head. Snapshots of his apartment and the streets, cafés and shops he frequents show up in batches on his website, with black blanks indicating places where he has not received permission to shoot, including New York University, where he teaches art.
Mann, an artist, musician and ECE professor at the University of Toronto who mounted a camera on his own head back in the 1990s, could be called the godfather of cyborg art, the inspiration for artists such as Bilal to consider how they might fuse their bodies and technology.
A pioneer of wearable computers and webcams, including various eyeglasses that use cameras to enhance sight, Mann is currently researching the possibilities of directing computers through brain waves, although he warns that a brain-computer interface is a long way off. Meanwhile, he’s perfecting his hydraulophone, the first musical instrument to make a sound exclusively with water – including a model incorporated into a hot tub and dubbed the balnaphone, in which Bilal was invited to take a dip.
Follow the link to read the full article on The Globe and Mail website.
In a study published online in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, Toronto researchers report that functional electrical stimulation (FES) therapy worked better than conventional occupational therapy alone to increase patients’ ability to pick up and hold objects.
FES therapy uses low-intensity electrical pulses generated by a pocket-sized electric stimulator.
“This study proves that by stimulating peripheral nerves and muscles, you can actually ‘retrain’ the brain,” says the study’s lead author, Professor Milos R. Popovic (IBBME), a senior scientist at Toronto Rehab and head of the hospital’s Neural Engineering and Therapeutics Team. “A few years ago, we did not believe this was possible.”
Follow the link to read the full article on Physorg.com.
Being able to move and communicate with the world has long been a major hurdle for children living with severe physical disabilities. Thought cognitively capable, they have few ways of expressing themselves to, and moving about in the outside world. However, advances in computer-based technology have allowed researchers to find innovative ways to help liberate these children, letting them interact and contribute with the wider society.
One of these researchers, Eric Wan (CompE 1T0), currently working on his master’s degree in Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, spends most of his days in the paediatric engineering research wing at The Bloorview Research Institute. His work involves designing new ways to improve the quality of lives of children living with severe disabilities.
He started programming when he was eight years old and since then, he enthuses, it has been his passion. “I really love it.”
His zeal is apparent and fruitful. As part of his undergraduate thesis, Wan created software for an award-winning “hum-activated” wheelchair. A child can power the wheelchair by simply making high- or low-pitched humming sounds. A vocal chord vibration sensor distinguishes between the different pitches to change direction. A major advantage of this wheelchair is that it drowns out unnecessary background noise such as street traffic or voices of people near by.