Engineering at the University of Toronto has held onto its 19th-place position for the second year in a row in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). It remains the premier institution in Canada for the fourth consecutive year.
ARWU is a well-regarded ranking of research universities around the world based on internationally comparable third-party quantitative data. The highest scoring institution is assigned a total score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top total score. The scores are then placed in descending order.
The Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences ranking is based on institutions’ scores in the following four indicators, each with a 25% weighting: highly cited research (HiCi); published articles in the field (PUB); percentage of articles published in the top 20% of journals in the field (TOP); and Engineering research expenditure (FUND). U of T Engineering ranks #1 in all four categories within Canada.
Click here to see a closer analysis of the university rankings.
U of T was the only Canadian university to place among the top 50 in Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences in the 2010 rankings. McGill University, which had ranked #49 last year, slipped out of the top 50 grouping this year.
U of T Engineering continues to rank #1 in Canada in all international surveys.
Follow the link to see the full rankings for Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences on the Academic Ranking of World Universities website.
“Murphy’s Law: his eyelids aren’t working today.”
Professor Goldie Nejat (MIE) fusses over Brian’s facial features, adjusting his pliable, rubbery skin, pushing it up over his eyeballs. Dr. Nejat, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, is used to machines: she became an anatomy expert just to create Brian, to help him appear human. Still, the motors that control his face don’t always co-operate.
Brian is a socially interactive robot, a prototype in development at U of T’s autonomous systems and biomechatronics lab. The 4-foot-6, 200-pound machine may one day assist the elderly in long-term care by interacting with residents, playing games and reminding those with cognitive impairments to do daily tasks, such as brushing their teeth. The Baycrest health-sciences centre in Toronto is already a partner in the project.
With projections showing that seniors will account for 23 to 25 per cent of the total population by 2036, nearly double the 13.9 per cent in 2009, Brian could take the strain off health-care workers in hospitals and live-in facilities and, ideally, help seniors stay in their own homes longer by monitoring the environment and providing assistance along with human health professionals.
Professor Nejat has no intention of replacing humans, describing her work as a “robot-human team.”
Follow the links to read the full article on The Globe and Mail website, or to view the video and interview with Professor Nejat on the IT World Canada website.
Aircraft wing designers have drawn their inspiration from birds since the dawn of aviation. But engineers are still finding ways of improving design based on examples found in the ornithological world.
In the world of unmanned air vehicles, one team of engineers has designed a morphed wing prototype which uses in-built shape memory alloy actuators that deform the shape of the wing when heated. Inspiration for this design was drawn from birds, as the University of Toronto’s Professor Shaker Meguid (MIE), who is heading the morphed wing research program, explains. “To achieve flight mission adaptability, birds change the size and shapes of their wings,” he says.
“We are trying to use similar principles to morph aircraft wings to make them highly adaptable. A bird glides for maximum lift and folds its wings for reduced drag. This is the basic principle adopted from birds that prompted us to focus on wing planform.”
Trees also played a part in inspiring the design because they have the ability to morph the shape of their leaves to decrease heat loss. “One could also mimic the shape and morphing characteristics of a leaf and apply them to an aircraft wing to optimise the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing,” says Professor Meguid.
He believes the technology behind the UAV morphed wing design could eventually be applied to civil aircraft, and claims that “some of the big airplane manufacturers are already interested in this technology and current research is being done to implement morphed wings.
“The fact that morphing wings will be used in commercial aircraft is certain; the only unknown is when this will happen,” he adds. “Most likely it will be in the near future.”
One of the most promising technologies for making inexpensive but reasonably efficient solar photovoltaic cells just got much cheaper. Scientists at the University of Toronto have shown that inexpensive nickel can work just as well as gold for one of the critical electrical contacts that gather the electrical current produced by their colloidal quantum dot solar cells.
The change to nickel can reduce the cell’s already low material costs by 40 to 80 percent, says Lukasz Brzozowski, the director of the Photovoltaics Research Program within the research group of Professor Ted Sargent (ECE). The research was presented in the July 12, 2010 issue of Applied Physics Letters, published by the American Institute of Physics.
Quantum dots are nanoscale bits of a semiconductor material that are created using low-cost,high-throughput chemical reactions in liquid solutions. Since their properties vary according to their size, quantum dots can be made to match the illumination spectrum. Professor Sargent’s group has pioneered the design and development of quantum dot solar cells that gather both visible and infrared light. The researchers have reached a power-conversion efficiency as high as 5 percent and aim to improve that to 10 percent before commercialization.
At first, nickel did not appear to do the job. But adding just one nanometer of lithium fluoride between the nickel and the dots created a barrier that stopped the contamination, and the cell’s efficiency jumped back up to the expected level.
This is the latest of several recent solar-cell milestones by the Canadian researchers. “We have been able to increase dramatically the efficiency of our photovoltaics over the last several years and continue to hold the performance world records,” Professor Sargent said.
Using your brain waves to control the environment around you, like the lights in your home or even your toaster, is already a reality. One Toronto-based company has developed a system called thought-control computing, and it is exploring a range of commercial opportunities that include screens on airplanes and video games.
Its philosophy is simple: if you can plug it in, you can control it with your brain. Ariel Garten, CEO of InteraXon, says the possibilities are endless. The technology involves a regular-looking headset, but embedded with electrodes that read brain waves. The brain waves are then processed on a computer.
The technology was demonstrated earlier this year at the Vancouver Olympics where visitors used their brain waves to control the lighting on three landmarks: the CN Tower, the Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls.
Garten was a student of Professor Steve Mann (ECE), credited with pioneering thought-controlled computing technology.
One of the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics is that measuring a physical system always disturbs it. If the system in question is a message in a series of digital bits encoded in the polarisation of light, this means that intercepting and reading the message can no longer be done surreptitiously. The receiver should be able to detect an eavesdropper and take appropriate countermeasures.
In practice, quantum-key-distribution systems rely on sophisticated optical equipment to prepare, transmit and detect the individual polarised photons that make up the key. And when these real-world components meet the clever academic theorems that guarantee security, holes emerge.
Research conducted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the National University of Singapore and the University of Toronto hacked into a system that connects several buildings on the National University of Singapore’s campus. For the first hack, small eavesdropping apparatus was designed to take advantage of a weakness in a particular kind of photon detector in the receiver’s receiving equipment. The second hack was carried out by a team from the University of Toronto, led by Professor Hoi-Kwong Lo (ECE), which stole information from a research version of a system made by ID Quantique—a Swiss firm trying to commercialise quantum cryptography—by taking advantage of synchronisation signals that pass between the sender and receiver.
As quantum hackers continue to put systems through their paces, such loopholes will be closed—as these now have been—and the systems become more secure.
Follow the link to read the full article in The Economist.