Engineering at U of T emerged a winner on Thursday when its researchers received several funding awards from Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation.
No fewer than four Engineering faculty members received Early Researcher Awards (ERA), which provide significant financial support to emerging leading researchers to build their research teams.
Mansoor Barati (MSE) received an award for his novel approach to energy recovery from slag, turning waste heat from metal production into an energy source. Metal manufacturing produces a high-temperature liquid waste, known as slag, which must be cooled in the air or in water, releasing a vast amount of heat in the process. Professor Barati is investigating a new approach for harnessing the energy of the waste heat. Energy recovery from slag presents a tremendous potential for both energy savings and carbon dioxide emission reduction.
Philippe Lavoie (UTIAS) took an award for his research on reducing harmful emissions from aircraft through active flow control. His work will seek more effective ways to control the flow of air over civil aircraft by manipulating the dynamics of airflow around airplanes to produce improved flow characteristics that can reduce drag, structural vibration, noise and harmful emissions. His findings hold great potential for reducing the environmental impact and cost of operating airplanes.
Matthew J. Roorda (CivE) received an award to support his research using global-positioning system data to develop models of commercial vehicle operations in urban areas. This research intends to provide policy makers with better decision-support tools to analyze and predict the impact of public sector decisions on the freight transportation network. This research could provide policy makers with better tools to analyze and predict the impact of public sector decisions on the transportation network, leading to more responsive and effective solutions.
Lidan You (MIE) hopes to one day grow living replacement bone tissue that could treat osteoporosis-related fractures, which affect more women in Canada than breast and ovarian cancer combined. Her Early Researcher Award will support her work on rational mechanobiological-based design of tissue-engineered bone by first establishing what a “healthy bone cell” is, then testing different biomaterials for their ability to direct adult stem cells to become bone cells.
Engineering researchers also received several Ontario Research Fund-Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program awards.
Dionne Aleman (MIE) will study high-performance computing infrastructure for large-scale healthcare optimization; using mathematical modelling, Professor Aleman’s goal is to ensure that Ontario’s health care system delivers medical care as accurately as possible through quantitative analysis.
Tom Chau (IBBME) will further his work in helping severely disabled children interact with other people and their environment. Working in the Paediatric Rehabilitation Intelligent Systems Multidisciplinary (PRISM) Lab, Professor Chau is studying body signals with the goal of equipping the children with the tools they need to direct their own care.
Craig Steeves (UTIAS) will develop lightweight materials for the aerospace industry which can reduce environmental effects and minimize damage from fatigue and impact. Professor Steeves’ work could give the aerospace industry a significant advantage over its competitors, and has important applications for other transportation industries including auto and rail.
“We are delighted that the hard work and outstanding research of our faculty members have been acknowledged through these prestigious awards,” said ProfessorStewart Aitchison, Engineering’s Vice-Dean of Research.
The University of Toronto will receive $4.2 million through ORF-RI to support 25 projects and the work of 29 principal investigators (PIs), and $2.5 million through ERA to support 18 projects and the work of 18 PIs.
Follow the links to learn more about the ORF-RI program and to read the story on the U of T website.
The science fiction of melding man and machine has played out for decades onscreen, from The Six Million Dollar Man to The Terminator. But the bionic hybrid age may well be flickering to life – real life – in the Calgary lab where scientists who made history fusing snail brain cells to a computer microchip six years ago are poised to try the same feat with human cells.
Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, IBBME), a biomedical researcher at the University of Toronto who holds the Canada research chair in tissue engineering, described a “growing momentum” in the bio-engineering field as collaboration increases between engineers, biologists, and surgeon scientists.
In this case, Professor Shoichet said the Calgary researchers “have made a strong case for what they achieved,” recording the activity of neurons. But she cautioned that the new paper involved only a small sample size of neurochip recordings, and these, she noted, were not based on mammalian brain cells, but mollusc neurons.
Follow the link to read the full article on The Globe and Mail website.
A fish-shape musical instrument that spouts water jets into which users dip their fingers is being hailed as an example of a new user interface. The instrument, called a hydraulophone, involves putting your fingers on tiny water jets and producing a soothing, organ-like music.
“What we really do with these kind of interfaces is make them as addictive as possible, and to do that we have to find a way you can exert your own influence on a system,” Professor Steve Mann of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering told attendees at the Singularity Conference in San Francisco last weekend. “It can be a very absorbing experience.”
Professor Mann has been billed as the world’s first cyborg. For about 30 years now he has been wearing some sort of wearable computing device, including an Eyetap, a pair of glasses that allows the eye to function as a camera, as well as digital systems monitoring his heart and brain. These devices are part of a world he calls computer-mediated reality.
Follow the link to read the full article on Wired.com.
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.”