Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

U of T social enterprise aims to bring smarter irrigation to areas without electricity

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:48:21 +0000

U of T social enterprise aims to bring smarter irrigation to areas without electricity

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 03/23/2021 - 11:48

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Corridor Water Technologies, which aims to use a passive irrigation controller to aid agriculture in regions without electricity, grew out of U of T lab research that involved trips to meet local famers in Nicaragua (photo by dimarik via Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

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Global Lens

Alumni

Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Global

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Research & Innovation

You can’t grow food without water – but in many parts of the world, there isn’t much water to spare.

Now, two alumni of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have developed a solution they think could help.

Austin Mclean and Rashmi Satharakulasinghe are the co-founders of Corridor Water Technologies, a social enterprise that aims to commercialize a passive water irrigation controller for use in areas without electricity.

“Irrigation is water intensive, but it can be made a lot more efficient if you only turn on the water when the plants require it,” says Satharakulasinghe. “There are a number of smart sensing systems available to help farmers make that call, but right now they all require electricity, which isn’t always available to farmers outside of the developed world.”

The team’s solution grew out of research conducted over the past several years in the lab of Amy Bilton, an associate professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering. Bilton and her students made several trips to the community of Pedro Arauz, Nicaragua to meet with local farmers, understand their needs and test out various designs. Bilton continues to serve as a senior adviser to Corridor Water Technologies.

Known as a passive irrigation controller system (PICS), the team’s device includes a probe that is capable of sensing how wet or dry the soil is via physical and chemical characteristics. Using a property known as “soil suction pressure,” the device mechanically opens or closes a valve to regulate the flow of water – all without the use of electricity.

“We have been through numerous iterations of the design, experimenting with different materials and mechanical principles,” says Mclean. “We are still looking to improve some of the smaller mechanics of the design and integrate unique options where possible.”

Austin Mclean and Rashmi Satharakulasinghe demonstrate the electricity-free irrigation controller they developed to help farmers in developing countries make more efficient use of water in agriculture (photo by Corridor Water Technologies)

By turning irrigation on and off automatically to maintain a desired soil saturation level, the PICS can reduce water use by up to 20 per cent compared to current practices of flood irrigation. Farmers can “set it and forget it,” freeing up time for other tasks while secure in the knowledge that their plants won’t get too dry or too wet, and will grow at their optimum rate.

“We designed our device to be simple in terms of features, operation and maintenance,” says Satharakulasinghe. “It can easily be tuned to the different crops common in the community, or even adapted for new crops that would help farmers diversify their range.”

In June of 2020, Corridor Water Technologies placed in the top three at ISHOW USA, a competition organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The win netted them a US$10,000 seed grant, which they have been using to further improve their design, as well as one-on-one coaching sessions with industry professionals.

“We have been fortunate that during the pandemic we had access to a U of T greenhouse to do testing in,” says Mclean. “This summer we are planning to expand our field testing, hopefully including warmer areas closer to the conditions of our intended farming community outside of Canada.”

Satharakulasinghe says that in addition to agricultural benefits, the PICS could have several social benefits in the communities where it could one day be deployed.

“Often in these communities, it is the women of the household who run the farming activities while the men travel to the city for labour work,” she says. “By bringing additional income to the family, PICS could also promote gender equality.”

“These types of projects provide students with opportunities to work across cultures and disciplines at the same time as addressing a hard and constrained engineering challenge,” says Bilton. “Austin and Rashmi are doing a fantastic job, and it’s very rewarding to see a group of former students take some tech which was developed in our lab and turn it into a venture like Corridor Water.

“The reason we do the work we do is to have an impact.”

Researchers from U of T, Harvard study collective human behaviour amid COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 14:26:52 +0000

Researchers from U of T, Harvard study collective human behaviour amid COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/29/2020 - 10:26

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With funding from the Manulife CIFAR Population Health & Well-being Grant Program, U of T Mississauga researcher Joel Levine will develop new computational modelling software to reveal patterns of human behaviour (photo by Orbon Alija via Getty Images)

Blake Eligh

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Global Lens

Artificial Intelligence

Biology

Computer Science

Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Faculty of Arts & Science

Hospital for Sick Children

Research & Innovation

U of T Mississauga

A new collaboration between researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard University will use machine learning to gain a better understanding of human social networks in a post-pandemic world.

Joel Levine, a professor of biology at U of T Mississauga, and Takao Hensch, professor at Harvard University and the University of Tokyo, will lead one of six projects supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The researchers hold senior positions with CIFAR’s child and brain development program, where Hensch is program director and Levine is a senior research fellow.

The duo will draw upon their ongoing work with fruit flies and mice to develop new computational modelling software. The tool will aid in the analysis of data sources, such as videos, to reveal patterns of behaviour in human social interactions, and provide insights into the developmental and neural basis of social structures.

Levine, who studies the link between genetics and fruit fly behaviour, says we can see patterns of behaviour in all corners of the animal kingdom, including flies, ants and bees.

“There are collective behaviours that seem to be wired into us, too,” he says. “If you’re walking in a flow of people on the street and stop to look up, you’ll find that people who pass will look up, too.

“Understanding these dynamics can provide insight into the rules that guide us, and the consequence for following those rules.”

Levine is excited about the possibilities for the new software.

“This project will create methods to better understand the way networks are created, and how they might be manipulated or reconfigured to maintain the value of the way humans interact in groups, allowing for environmental considerations such as the COVID-19 virus,” he says.

“This grant will allow us to develop those methods and create a software pipeline to analyze experiments on social networks and the mechanisms that create them.”

U of T Mississauga alumna Sara El-Shawa will develop software for the program. The data scientist studied computational science and biology at U of T before taking an internship with Hensch’s lab at Harvard. She will begin graduate studies with another CIFAR fellow at the University of Guelph this fall.

“COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to look at questions about social processes like the delivery of health care or goods and services,” says Levine. “This tool will provide insight into how we connect with each other and how that contributes to our quality of life.”

The initiative is one of six projects to receive funding through the Manulife CIFAR Population Health & Well-being Grant Program, which enables interdisciplinary research on social, cognitive and biological implications of the pandemic. Projects by two U of T researchers also received funding through the program. Associate Professor Anna Goldenberg of the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Hospital for Sick Children is a collaborator on a cross-disciplinary study of how the pandemic affects the brains and immune systems of children. Professor Goldie Nejat of the department of mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering will study how robots might serve vulnerable communities.

Levine holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in mechanisms and features of social behaviour. His research is supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Climate change could impact omega-3 levels worldwide, U of T researchers find

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 16:25:39 +0000

Climate change could impact omega-3 levels worldwide, U of T researchers find

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 09/26/2019 - 12:25

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Most people get DHA, an essential omega-3 fatty acid, from eating fish, which in turn get it from eating algae. But a U of T study suggests climate change will result in less need for algae to produce DHA (photo by Stock Colours via Getty Images)

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Faculty of Arts & Science

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

Climate change won’t just bring rising sea levels and more extreme weather — it could also impact your dinner plate.

A new University of Toronto study suggests that a warmer world will decrease the availability of a nutrient that is key to development and brain health. The study, published in the journal Ambio, investigates worldwide production of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), a naturally occurring essential omega-3 fatty acid. The group of molecules is needed for higher-level brain functioning and cognition, memory, eyesight, particularly at crucial stages in fetal brain development.

Most humans get their DHA from eating fish, which in turn get it from the algae that they eat. But Tim Rodgers, a PhD candidate in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry, says that as ocean temperatures rise, the need for algae to produce DHA decreases.

“To counteract the effect of higher temperatures, which can make their cell membranes too fluid, algae typically produce fewer polyunsaturated fats (such as DHA) in a process known as homeoviscous adaptation,” says Rodgers (left), who is a first co-author of the study along with Stefanie Colombo of Dalhousie University.

“Algae is the bedrock of aquatic food chains, so this decrease in DHA production works its way right up to the fish we eat, which make up a significant source of the long chain omega-3 fatty acids in the global diet.”

Rodgers, who is also a graduate student in U of T’s Diamond Environmental Research Group under supervisor Professor Miriam Diamond, used a form of computer modelling known as Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis to predict the amount of DHA that will be available under various scenarios of climate change developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Under the worst case scenario – known as RCP 8.5, which assumes that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates indefinitely – the team found that, over the next 80 years, the amount of DHA available in the food chain would decrease by 10 percentage points to 58 per cent.

The team also estimated the results on the diets of humans around the world. If the loss of DHA were spread out evenly, the team suggests that up to 96 per cent of humans would not be able to obtain enough DHA to maintain a healthy diet.

But that scenario may understate the impacts on vulnerable populations, the researchers say, because wealthy countries such as Canada, which doesn’t produce enough DHA domestically and relies upon trade to supplement this need, would likely push to the front of the line.

“As global DHA levels decrease, it’s not difficult to envision a situation where rich countries use their economic advantages to increase their access to naturally occurring sources and with more expensive supplements,” says Rodgers.

This means that the impacts of a shortage would likely be felt by the most vulnerable populations in poorer countries, as well as by more vulnerable people, such as infants and developing fetuses.

“Even at the low end of the model, meaning the less extreme scenarios, the impact of declining DHA will still be significant,” says Rodgers. “Based on the current trajectory of the climate, even the most optimistic projections have us heading towards a pretty alarming loss in human potential.”

The study, a collaboration among U of T researchers from chemical engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Earth sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science and nutritional sciences in the Faculty of Medicine, as well as researchers from Ryerson University and Dalhousie University, is the first comprehensive look at DHA declines due to global warming specifically.

The research received support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

NSERC prizes awarded to five University of Toronto scholars

sgupta — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 13:04:08 +0000

NSERC prizes awarded to five University of Toronto scholars sgupta Tue, 02/16/2016 - 08:04

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David Sinton, Shana Kelley, Ted Sargent, Stephen Wright and Barbara Sherwood Lollar (all photos by NSERC/composite image by Geoff Agnew)

Arthur Kaptainis

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

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Pharmacy

NSERC

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Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

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Read about previous NSERC awards for U of T researchers

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens

sgupta — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 15:42:52 +0000

Star Wars: The Force Awakens sgupta Fri, 12/18/2015 - 10:42

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These boots are made for walking – stormtroopers marching in the Legends of the Force Motorcade at Disney's Hollywood Studios, Walt Disney World, FL. (photo by Scott Smith via Flickr)

Veronica Zaretski

Author legacy

Veronica Zaretski

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Students

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Experts on the lack of diversity, the problem with Padme, the pitfalls of filling in narrative gaps – and why we love the franchise

The Internet is ablaze as fans around the world share their experience of Star Wars: The Force Awakens − the movie that crushed box office records with $529 million worldwide in its opening weekend.

And the University of Toronto’s experts – faculty and students – are among those waiting in line.

U of T News asked leading scholars of cinema, media and engineering to reflect on the Star Wars universe, from its politics to its futuristic technology – and the cultural impact of a series that has inspired imaginations across generations.

“George Lucas is extremely interested in politics, and you can tell when you look at the prequels,” Professor Emerita Anne Lancashire says. “Certainly in the first trilogy he made it very clear that he was an anti-war activist.”

Lancashire (pictured at left), published five articles on the Star Wars films and sees a strong connection between pressing headlines in 2015 and the Star Wars narrative. “The dialogue in Star Wars is so explicit right from the start. In the first and the second trilogy, Yoda says early on: ‘Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.’ Who is suffering? In fact everyone is suffering.”

“I think that the first two trilogies have a theme that is really important right now,” says Lancashire. “For nations, the greatest enemy of democracy and freedom is fear. And everywhere these days most politicians work on people’s fears in order to do what they want and to get what they want.”

She also points out that she finds some of the portrayal of some of the female characters in Star Wars frustrating. “I find Padme to be an extraordinarily frustrating character in the Revenge of the Sith,” she says. “I wanted a strong character that redeemed herself at the end and she was not that.”

Lancashire hopes to see more of the first trilogy in the upcoming films than the second trilogy. “People expect the familiar but they also expect you to vary the familiar,” she says. “If you really want to make a message work, you’ve really got to make it work emotionally, not just intellectually.”

Photo above and photo below of the pop-up Star Wars shop at 277 Queen St. by Sarah Khan

Associate Professor Nicholas Sammond of cinema studies and English department has tickets to see Star Wars on Christmas Eve. “I’m most looking forward to see what the audience does.”

Sammond, whose teaching includes courses in media and racial formation, points out the lack of diversity in previous Star Wars films.

“I’ve always been struck [with the lack of diversity] even in the films Lucas did before Star Wars, like American Graffiti. Lucas came out of the California’s Central Valley, which is an intensely Latino area and yet the world that he portrayed is completely white. He is tone deaf to things like Jar Jar Binks’ accent,” Sammond says.

“There are a couple of reasons why the new Star Wars film is more diverse,” he continues. “One reason is Disney. Disney has a great deal of investment in being non-controversial and appealing to the broadest sense of family. It has had its own set of criticisms that it worked very hard and somewhat clumsily to address in recent animations.

“Part of the reason I think they can’t get it right is because we can’t agree on how to get it right when it comes to issues of race, gender and sexuality”.

But that motivation to address representation in film is commercially-driven, not altruistic, Sammond says. “The majority of the money that’s going to be made out of the film will be made internationally. And as the international market becomes more sensitive to issues of representations, Hollywood filmmakers are going to be more sensitive to issues of representation.

“It always comes down to the bottom line, especially at this level of blockbuster filmmaking.”

Justin Morris, a PhD candidate in cinema studies says the first Star Wars film initially borrowed a number of storytelling and promotional techniques inherent to the Hollywood serial films of the 30s and 40s, and recycled them for a different audience.

He agrees with Lancashire that the second trilogy did not have the same impact as the first trilogy.

And the biggest mistakes in Lucas’ previous prequel trilogy? “Purposely filling in the imaginative gaps in the narrative,” he says.

Morris says that it will be important to see whether the producers of the films have recognized and mitigated “the entire franchise’s indebtedness to a particular brand of racist, colonial-orientalist adventure narrative.

“It has been argued that this didn’t rear its head until the prequels, but giving the original films a pass points to a far more subtle and insidious tradition of tired racist characterizations, and I’m hopeful that the producers have recognized this in planning the new slate of films,” he says.

Associate Professor Parham Aarabi of the department of electrical & computer engineering finds inspiration in the technological aspect of the Star Wars films.

“What I find interesting is that in our lifetime, probably in the next 5-10 years, we will see a dramatic impact on what artificial technology can do,” says Aarabi. “We’re starting to see it now with things like Siri and Google Now, but I think that’s just the beginning. Ten years from now we might see far beyond the science fiction of Star Wars or Star Trek.”

A big fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek franchises and the host of a Jedi Wars flying robotics competition in 2014, Aarabi looks forward to technologies seen in science fiction appearing in our world.

Medical technology in the science fiction realm particularly excites him. One example is the medical tricorder seen in Star Trek.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research with different hospitals, different doctors in creating apps and technologies that allow smartphones diagnose in understanding diseases. For example, we’ve looked at hand tremors, to see if there are indications that the tremor is due to Parkinson’s or due to alcohol withdrawal.”

Aarabi is also working with graduate student Wenzhi Guo on artificial intelligence research that might get us closer to one day talking with robots like the beloved Star Wars characters C-3PO and R2-D2.

Celebrating Ursula Franklin: pioneer in materials science and trailblazing feminist

sgupta — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 09:10:32 +0000

Celebrating Ursula Franklin: pioneer in materials science and trailblazing feminist sgupta Wed, 08/19/2015 - 05:10

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“There’s a lot that needs to be done but it’s up to the powerful, not the powerless. It’s the obligation of the powerful to be civilized.”

Our Faculty & Staff

Women of Impact

Usula Franklin

Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Subheadline

First female University Professor among the leaders honoured at Women of Impact symposium

University Professor Emerita Ursula Franklin is one of several inspirational figures being celebrated at Women of Impact, a symposium organized by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.

The event on Aug. 26 includes panels, presentations and working groups and is free for students. (Register here.)

Educated in Berlin, Franklin came to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral student in 1949. After 15 years as a senior scientist with the Ontario Research Foundation – where her research on strontium-90 in baby teeth was instrumental in achieving a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing – she rejoined U of T in 1967 as the first female professor of what is now known as materials science and engineering. (Read more about women in engineering at U of T.)

Franklin pioneered the field of archaeometry, applying modern materials science to the dating of archaeological artefacts. In 1984, Franklin became the first woman to receive the title of University Professor, the highest academic rank at U of T. She delivered the Massey Lectures in 1989 and holds more than 40 honorary doctorates. In recognition of her humanitarian work, Franklin received the United Nations Association’s Pearson Peace Medal in 2002.

How did your family background influence your interest in science?
I had very good, very serious parents. My father had four sisters, all of whom led their own life in the terms of that time. My mother was an academic. There was no question I could do whatever I felt I was able to do and interested in. There were no barriers. There was a very strong emphasis on thoughts, ideas, intellectual life rather than material things. My family was political. I had a very appropriate upbringing to end up in science, but I could have done anything else as far as my family was concerned. I went into science largely because of other things that were foreclosed to me.

My mother was Jewish and so another thing for me, being born in 1921, was that I was a young child when the Nazis came to power and with them the Nuremburg Laws and all it entailed. So, going into politics, going into law, was out of the question. What attracted me to science at that time was that it appeared to be objective. I remember being at school and seeing physics experiments and seeing a cathode ray tube and the magnet and the beam being bent and I suddenly had this feeling of great joy that even they, those people in government who were after us, couldn’t make an electron beam bend in any other direction. So, science seemed to be the field where I could escape politics.

Where do you feel you have made the biggest impact in your field?
The question of my own impact is hard to answer. I think that my most important contribution was, in fact, being there: my ongoing presence, the fact that young women knew where to find me, that I was ready to be consulted, and that my own career evolved clearly and openly. I do not think that any single thing that I did was unique, but the trajectory of a consistent professional life gave a sense of reality and possibility to others.

What did it mean to you to be appointed the first woman University Professor at the University of Toronto?
I was very pleased about it. There is such a profound difference in being the first and being the only. If you are the only woman, people can treat you like an oddity; if you are the first, then it is quite different. When you enter as the first, you begin not to feel so much personal discrimination, that cold blast of air that comes, “Oh dear, there they come and they may know something and they may want a job and they may want to change things.” There’s a profound difference. So being the first woman University Professor, I was really happy because it meant there would be others.

The one great joy I felt in my academic life, seeing the promotion of women, is that they got younger and younger. These incredibly long waiting times before competent women could be promoted would become progressively shorter. To see young women who have a life ahead of them be in a position that they deserve, that they have the scope and the recognition and the responsibility that they could carry, that, is real achievement. The next ones can be younger, more joyful, have more productive lives ahead of them, after they have been given recognition and some elbowroom.

Have you felt a responsibility to be a role model and mentor?
I did very much feel a responsibility with regard to mentoring, to see that the younger women wouldn’t get hurt or bruised. Many of my friendships with other women came out of that wish to see that the young women don’t drop out. I have now a number of good friends who were senior women in various positions; we met and worked with each other almost entirely by trying to find jobs, accreditation, and opportunities for women students or women engineers who came with offshore qualifications or women who ended up in community colleges because they couldn’t get other jobs. We tried to keep an eye and be in some way an extra protective coat for the younger women who had to go through the difficulties of an engineering education or the workplace.

How can we best nurture female leaders?
By hitting the guys on the rump every once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with women. In one of my papers that I wrote for Monique Frize after her remarkable efforts on women in engineering, I said how leery I am of attempts to make women fit into the male world. I call that weightlifting for girls. I don’t want to adjust women to the rough, tumble rudeness that used to be the world of engineers. I want to change the world of engineers so that women, while being practicing engineers, can also safely and cheerfully be themselves.

I’m one for setting some standards in the workplace so that it makes it unnecessary for women to look for protection. Again, it’s not a private opinion, it’s a structure: the structure of the workplace that contains men, women, and minorities has to be safe. The safest have to look after the least safe. There’s no other way of doing things.

What can we do now to promote women in science and engineering?
If you want to make this a civilized environment for women, it has to be a civilized environment for all. Women will and may change from being the obvious minority. It may be somebody else who’s next, who will be discriminated against. It must be a civilized workplace in which all who are competent and qualified can work without fear and without embarrassment. I think there’s a lot that needs to be done but it’s at the side of the powerful, not the powerless. It’s the powerful’s obligation to be civilized.

I can only say the same thing again and again: there’s nothing wrong with women and there’s nothing wrong with feminism – to say that it is essential to build one’s relationships on collaboration and not on rejection. It’s unpopular but it’s the only thing that works. I have no magic formula for how to convince the powerful to see that except it’s them who get hurt, and it’s them whose lives are deprived because they believe that hurting is legitimate. What’s left for them? They’re feared.

The Q & A above was excerpted from Women of Impact in the Canadian Materials, Metallurgy and Mining Field by Anne Millar and Mary Wells. Reprinted with the permission of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM). Copyright © 2015.

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Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

U of T social enterprise aims to bring smarter irrigation to areas without electricity

Researchers from U of T, Harvard study collective human behaviour amid COVID-19

Climate change could impact omega-3 levels worldwide, U of T researchers find

NSERC prizes awarded to five University of Toronto scholars

Read more about Sherwood Lollar

Read more about Kelley and Sargent

Read more about Sinton

Read more about Wright

Read about previous NSERC awards for U of T researchers

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Read more about artificial intelligence and machine learning

Celebrating Ursula Franklin: pioneer in materials science and trailblazing feminist