April 17, 2017 – Genecis, a student startup devoted to recycling food scraps into value-added products, has won the $5,000 second-place prize in the early-stage category of the inaugural RBC Prize for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The business pitch competition, held March 31, aims to reward and accelerate the best startups coming out of U of T. Student-led teams from all three campuses gathered at the Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport to share their most innovative ideas with an audience of startup enthusiasts, including investors and entrepreneurs.

Founder and CEO Luna Yu and her teammates, Bowen Le (Year 4 ChemE), Robert Fairley(Year 2 ECE), Fady Soliman (MechE 1T6), and Owen Li, aim to reduce food waste in restaurants by leasing on-site, automated machines that collect and process organic materials. The processed food waste will then be sold to companies that turn it into biodegradable plastics, bio-fuel or pharmaceutical drugs.

Genecis plans to target commercial kitchens that waste an average of 1.3 tonnes of food every week in North America. In an effort to divert food scraps from landfills, cities across America and Europe are instating organic disposal bans which prevent commercial buildings from throwing food waste away with regular garbage.

As a result, restaurants are finding it increasingly difficult and costly to dispose of organics. Genecis provides an easy, cost-effective solution to this problem while also benefitting the environment.

“We will be using the prize money to complete the construction of our prototype. It means a lot for us to receive the capital and support needed to fund our research and continue to improve our prototyping,” says Yu.

Once completed, Yu says that a single machine will be able to offset 243 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. “Standard passenger vehicles release 4.7 tonnes of CO₂ every year, which means a restaurant can offset the emissions of 51.7 cars just by using one of our machines,” adds Yu.

Yu and her team are continuing their entrepreneurial journey as members of The Entrepreneurship Hatchery’s 2017 Nest cohort this Summer. They hope to have a finished viable commercial prototype to bring to market by Demo Day in September.

 For more information about The Hatchery, please visit uoft.me/hatchery.

April 17, 2017 – Two MIE students are among 10 of U of T Engineering’s top undergraduate students recognized by the Ontario Professional Engineers Foundation for Education (OPEFE) for high academic achievement and co-curricular contributions.

Two entrance scholarships and eight in-course scholarships totalling $15,000 were presented to students at a reception held in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology on March 23.

“It’s an honour for me to present these scholarships to such a remarkable group of students,” said Marisa Sterling, P.Eng. (ChemE 9T1), president of the OPEFE. “It’s important that we give back to the next generation so we can keep evolving the profession — we’re only as strong as those whom we surround ourselves with.”

Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) established OPEFE in 1959 and it remains one of U of T Engineering’s longest-running partnerships. OPEFE’s scholarships are funded by contributions from professional engineers across the province from organizations such as PEO and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers.

OPEFE 2017 scholarship recipients
Richard Yuze Li (Year 3 IndE)

Richard Yuze Li is passionate about data science and operation research. Last summer, he worked as a software engineer intern for the Royal Bank of Canada. Li has been actively involved in sports and creating job opportunities for the student community. He is currently part of the You’re Next Career Network, the largest student-run career organization in Canada. This summer, he will be conducting research in data science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Calvin Rieder (Year 2 MechE)

Calvin Rieder is interested in the areas of energy and water systems. Over the past several years, he has worked on designing solutions that combine environmental engineering with social justice to increase access to clean water where it is most acutely needed. He has been heavily involved in the U of T Human Powered Vehicle Design Team, contributing to the design and construction of two speedbikes. Rieder is also passionate about music and is a tenor in the Skule™ Choir.

 

 

Read more at Engineering Alumni News.

April 7, 2017 – On April 6, more than 100 faculty, students, industry clients, alumni and proud parents celebrated the achievements of MIE’s capstone design students. Over 250 students worked in teams to complete 66 projects for top industry clients. This year, the department was proud to introduce two new award prizes, the John H. Weber Scholarship and The Peri Family Industrial Engineering Design Award, thanks to the generosity of MIE alumni. The awards were given out by David F. Poirier (IndE 8T1), MIE Advisory Board Chair, and board member John Peri (IndE 8T4), respectively.

This year’s winners are:

Mechanical Engineering

John H. Weber Scholarship

“Test Apparatus for Nose Landing-gear Shimmy”
Members: Eeshaan Patil, Arshdeep Dhaliwal, Abhirav Kotwal, Harsh Soni
Supervisor: Kamran Behdinan
Client: ARL-MLS  / a collaborative project with SPP Canada Aircraft

First Place:

“Optimization of a Wind-Powered Water Pump”
Members: Charlotte Bierman-Dyk, Jordan Lee, Helen Song, Anita Tran
Supervisor: Amy Bilton
Client: Winds of Change

Second Place (tie):

“Baseball Pitching Machine”
Members: Robert Goldberg, Aiden Solala, Adam Thomas, Karan Shukla
Supervisor: David Sinton
Client: Blue Jays

“Test Apparatus for Nose Landing-gear Shimmy”
Members: Eeshaan Patil, Arshdeep Dhaliwal, Abhirav Kotwal, Harsh Soni 
Supervisor: Kamran Behdinan
Client: ARL-MLS / a collaborative project with SPP Canada Aircraft

Third Place:

“Gesture Recognition Device”
Members: Jun Lin Guan, Xuecheng Wang, Chaochan Liu, Yudi Dong
Supervisor: Jean Zu
Client: VDML

Industrial Engineering

The Peri Family Industrial Engineering Design Award:

“Social Media Analytics: Making the Most of Online Data”
Members: Anton Blotchtinski, Jason Rizk, Vibhor Sachdeva
Supervisor: Scott Sanner
Client: Shopify

Second Place:

“GRW and MACD Predictive Financial Platform”
Members: Amanzhol Zhangeldin, Qi Pan, Louis Vo
Supervisor: Roy Kwon
Client: Bank of America

Third Place:

“User Experience Redesign”
Members: Ralph Santo, Ashton Sidhu, Sneha Shekar
Supervisor: Mariano Consens
Client: IBM

April 3, 2017 – This year, 116 fourth-year undergraduate students from various engineering programs formed 24 multidisciplinary design teams to take on industry challenges, as part of  U of T Engineering’s Multidisciplinary Capstone Project (MCP) course. The unique MCP course requires students to apply technical knowledge in a multidisciplinary environment. After 8 months of collaborating with their industry clients, they displayed their final design solutions and results at the Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Projects (MCP) Showcase on March 30.

The Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Project (MCP) Course, now in its fourth year, has enabled 350 students from across all undergraduate engineering programs in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering to work together on real-world projects proposed by industry partners.

This year’s industry clients include Astronauts for Hire, Bombardier Aerospace, Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC), Drone Delivery Canada, Guycan, Kinectrics Inc. NASA, Pratt and Whitney Canada, RBC Capital Markets, United Steel Workers and more.

April 3, 2017 – For nearly 40 years, U of T Engineering’s Professional Experience Year (PEY) internship program has connected talented students with innovative companies looking to benefit from an influx of energy and new ideas.

The paid internships — with an average salary of more than $47,000 per year — take place after second or third year and last 12 to 16 months. In 2016-2017, more than 730 U of T Engineering students were hired on PEY internships, including 65 placements outside of Canada. Employers range from local startups to major global corporations such as Apple, General Motors and Shell, as well as hospitals, universities and governments.

Other students currently on PEY internships include:

Sarah Lim (Year 3 MechE) — teaBOT

More than 330 employers sought PEY interns this year, but for Lim, one really stood out. “I wanted to work at teaBOT because I wanted to be part of something that had a consumer-facing, everyday application,” she says.

TeaBOT makes vending-machine-sized robots that deliver custom cups of loose-leaf tea via a mobile app. The company was co-founded by Rehman Merali, a PhD student at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, and is rapidly expanding across North America.

Working for a startup makes for a varied experience, something Lim really enjoys. “If we are getting ready to build teaBOTs then I will be building some subassemblies and putting them into the machine,” she says. “On other days, I use computer-aided design software to model or test new ideas that we may want to pursue.”

While her courses provided a good foundation in the technical aspects of her work, Lim says the internship has given her a better sense of how customers will interact with a product.

“Working here has made me a lot more interested in designing things that are not just functional but also look good,” she says. “We went to a trade show, and it was amazing to see how many people wanted to use and try out our robot.”

Peter Wen (Year 3 MechE) — Verity Studios

Wen is spending a year in Zurich working for Verity Studios. Founded by alumnus Raffaello D’Andrea (EngSci 9T1), Verity Studios uses autonomous flying robots to create memorable performances for live events and stage productions. “I wanted to work in a startup environment, although the fact that it’s in beautiful Switzerland doesn’t hurt,” says Wen.

On his second day, a coworker asked Wen if he was scared of heights. “I boldly answered no,” says Wen. “I spent the afternoon 14 metres in the air, fighting my trembling fingers to tie knots along the rafters, installing the radio units that help our drones navigate.”

For Wen, the experience embodies the trust that the company put in him. His other duties have included fabricating parts for new prototypes and solving mechanical problems for the team, half of whom are software engineers. “One of the key lessons I learned was to value my time properly,” he says. “I used to spend hours smoothing out my CAD models to make them beautiful. Now I stop once it’s good enough to accomplish the task at hand.”

After his PEY internship is complete, Wen plans to return to TeleHex, a company he founded with support from The Hatchery at U of T Engineering. “This experience has made me realize that I love working in small companies where I can do a little bit of everything,” he says.

Learn more about TeleHex.

Read more at U of T Engineering News.

March 31, 2017 – Professor Chi-Guhn Lee has been appointed Interim Chair, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering for a three-month term, effective April 1, 2017.

Professor Lee joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in 2001. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, and to Full Professor in 2016.   From 2011-2014, he served as the Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies and since 2014 he has been the Associate Chair, Graduate Studies. In addition to his duties as Interim Chair, he will continue to oversee the graduate portfolio.

March 24, 2017 – Professor Jean Zu has been appointed Dean of the Charles V. Schaefer Jr. School of Engineering and Science at Stevens Institute of Technology (US), effective May 1, 2017. She will end her term as Chair, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering on March 31, 2017.

Professor Zu has served in the leadership of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering since 2008, first as the inaugural Associate Chair, Research, and then as Chair starting in 2009. Under her leadership, the department has successfully recruited 13 outstanding faculty members, and has achieved record numbers in both undergraduate and graduate student enrolment.

She has worked strategically to develop the department’s research collaborations with industry and international partners, and she has advanced the outreach activities to alumni and donors. A recent achievement for the department is the exemplary outcome to increase gender diversity in the MIE undergraduate programs. In 2016, the incoming first-year class was comprised of 49.7 per cent women, up from 29.2 per cent in 2015.

An announcement will be made shortly regarding the appointment of an Interim Chair who will provide administrative leadership to the department while a search for the next Chair proceeds.

As dean, she will oversee a school with more than 170 faculty members. Stevens was the first school of mechanical engineering in the US, and now provides a multi-disciplinary, design-based education rooted in technology and the applied sciences. The school’s eight departments serve both undergraduate and graduate students and offer more than 50 academic programs and majors.

Professor Zu’s research interests reside in mechanical vibrations, dynamic analysis, design and mechatronics of various mechanical systems. She has successfully collaborated with many different companies on research projects with a focus on automotive applications. She recently extended her research to biomedical instruments and vibration-based energy harvesting. She published over 300 refereed papers, including 160 journal papers, and attracted numerous grants and contracts from government and industry to support her research.

She graduated with B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in China. After two years of working as a lecturer and researcher at Tsinghua University, she traveled to Canada and obtained her PhD from the University of Manitoba. Professor Zu joined the University of Toronto’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in 1994, and was soon promoted to associate professor in 1999, and to full professor in 2004. Zu has served as Chair, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering since July 2009. Her contributions to her profession outside of the university are extensive. She served as the president of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) from 2012 to 2014, and is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (CSME). She served as president of the CSME from 2006 to 2008, on the Grant Selection Committee of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) from 2004 to 2007, and served as the associate editor of the ASME Journal of Vibrations and Acoustics from 2007 to 2013. She has worked extensively to raise both awareness and funding for engineering programs at the University of Toronto and across Canada.

 

 

March 21, 2017 – Students at U of T Engineering can now choose to learn how to manipulate the materials and methods that will shape future generations of everyday products, from wearable electronics and communications devices to self-driving vehicles and innovative medical diagnostics.

U of T Engineering’s new optional minor in Advanced Manufacturing will prepare tomorrow’s engineering leaders to design the products of the future, as well as the systems for fabricating their components and delivering them to customers.

Set to launch in fall 2017, the multidisciplinary program provides a strong foundation for aspiring product managers, researchers or entrepreneurs. It joins seven other minors that U of T Engineering students can pursue as they tailor their degree toward their academic interests, including Bioengineering, Sustainable Energy and Engineering Business.

“We have a major manufacturing hub here in southern Ontario, and manufacturing is one of the key drivers of the global economy,” says Hani Naguib (MIE, MSE) director of the Toronto Institute for Advanced Manufacturing, which is coordinating the new program.

Naguib points to Canadian companies such as Bombardier in the aerospace industry and Celestica in electronics as examples of thriving enterprises with a need for innovative manufacturing expertise. But he also has an eye on early-stage industries that have the potential for major growth in the coming years.

“If we really want to compete worldwide, it has to be with high-end products: biomedical devices, wearable technologies, electric vehicles,” says Naguib.

The new minor draws on the Faculty’s strengths in three key areas:

• Advanced materials — Nanoengineering could lead to materials that are ultra-strong yet lightweight, or that replace fossil-fuel-derived plastics with plant-derived alternatives. This area also includes ‘smart materials’ that respond to changes in their environment, critical for making sensors in wearable technology or self-driving vehicles.
• Advanced processing — Additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) enables each component or product to be customized at very low cost. New forms of laser cutting and coating technologies could shrink the size and cost of electronic devices while increasing their power.
• Advanced logistics — Big data provides an opportunity to make smarter decisions about scheduling, supply chains, transportation and delivery. This has the potential to reduce waste, lower costs and enhance the efficiency of manufacturing operations.

In addition to these technical aspects, the new minor also includes courses that emphasize management competencies, delivered in collaboration with the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering. “There is no manufacturing without leadership,” says Naguib.

Naguib expects that graduates of the new program will take a variety of paths: some will hold senior positions in manufacturing companies, while others will create new companies to build products that haven’t been invented yet.

“It’s amazing to see how far our students go with an idea,” says Naguib. “We have our own startup incubators such as The Entrepreneurship Hatchery and Start@UTIAS, and we’re close to other U of T entrepreneurship accelerators in the Banting and Best Centre, as well as MaRS. What we’re providing is a foundation that covers the entire process, from engineering to management to logistics.”

Applications for the Advanced Manufacturing Minor are now open to first-year students in all disciplines, and there is no limit on the number of spaces. Courses will begin in September 2017.

March 20, 2017 – ATMs and coffee shops such as Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Second Cup make ideal locations for placing automated external defibrillators (AEDs), according to a new study led by U of T Engineering researchers Professor Timothy Chan (MIE) and Christopher Sun (MIE PhD candidate), in collaboration with St. Michael’s Hospital.

When a patient suffers cardiac arrest, every second counts — the chances of survival decrease by 10 per cent each minute. Responding quickly can be the difference between life and death, and that means having immediate access to a nearby AED.

“Previous research on AED placements had focused on broadly defined location categories, like shopping malls or office buildings,” said Sun. “But these categories generalize many individual businesses, which have different hours, activities performed, and other unique properties that meant we could be missing critical insight on which locations are really high risk. So we wanted to get more specific: which individual locations or businesses could AEDs be placed to make sure they are accessible to the largest number of people throughout the day?”

Their new study, published today in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, looked at where cardiac arrests occur, to find locations where AEDs would be most valuable.

First, the researchers identified all businesses with 20 or more locations in Toronto — facilities such as Tim Hortons coffee shops or libraries that would make good candidates to place AEDs in. Then they looked at the number of cardiac arrests that occurred within 100 metres of each location, during the businesses’ operating hours. Using this data, Chan and Sun calculated the “spatiotemporal cardiac arrest coverage” provided by each location or business. The specific locations and businesses were then ranked to determine a “Top 10” list of prime spots to place AEDs.

“We found that coffee shops and ATMs ranked highly across several related metrics, and that those rankings were stable over the years,” said Tim Chan, who is the director of the Centre for Healthcare Engineering at the University of Toronto and a Canada Research Chair in Novel Optimization and Analytics in Health.

“What we found really interesting is that ATMs, as opposed to the more traditional businesses, are often standalone or outdoors, and are often available 24/7. They’re also universally recognizable and already have an electronic and security infrastructure — hypothetically, if we were to have AEDs paired with ATMs, it would be very beneficial,” said Sun.

Three coffee shop chains — Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Second Cup — as well as five of the big banks with many ATM locations, including RBC and Scotiabank, made the top 10. Tim Hortons was ranked first, with more than 300 shops in Toronto. These locations alone would have provided AED coverage for more than 200 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests over an eight-year period.

The researchers hope this new study could soon lead to AEDs placed in these optimal locations.

“Health organizations, foundations and policymakers aiming to develop public access defibrillator programs could use our rankings to identify promising businesses to develop partnerships for AED deployment,” added Chan.

Chan’s lab has a number of ongoing research projects on AED placements, including using drones to deliver AEDs, and optimizing AED placements in high-rise buildings.

“Ultimately, we want to get AEDs in the right locations, so they are accessible when needed most,” said Chan.

Sun says cardiac arrests are unique because in the early stages they can be treated as effectively by untrained responders as by paramedics. “That’s why finding out the best placements for AEDs is so important,” said Sun. “We have the opportunity to save lives based on our level of preparation and organization.”

Top 10 locations for AEDs based on coverage

1. Tim Hortons
2. RBC ATMs
3. Subway restaurants
4. Scotiabank ATMs
5. CIBC ATMs
6. TD ATMs
7. Green P public parking lots
8. Starbucks
9. BMO ATMs
10. Second Cup

March 17, 2017 – A drone network could be deployed to speed defibrillators to bystanders trying to help people in cardiac arrest, getting the devices to the patient faster than emergency services, a recent Canadian study suggests.

Researchers examined historical data on 53,702 cardiac arrests over 26,851 square kilometers (10,367 square miles) of rural and urban regions surrounding Toronto, Ontario, to see how drones might be deployed to get help to cardiac arrest patients more quickly than typical 911 response times.

If drones were spread evenly across the region, researchers calculated that it would require 37 drones spread across 23 bases to get patients started on defibrillator treatment about one minute faster than they would have been if they waited for emergency services.

“Because the drone can fly in a straight line, potentially avoiding obstacles that the ambulance cannot, the drone can arrive to scene more quickly and be carrying a defibrillator that a bystander can use before the paramedics arrive,” said Timothy Chan, director of the Center for Healthcare Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Read more at The Globe and Mail.