March 13, 2017 – The first time Huda Idrees (IndE 1T3) became a CEO she was just 12 years old.

Having learned several computer-programming languages and Web design at school in Saudi Arabia, one day it dawned on the enterprising young woman that she could sell those services. Her first client was a landscape architect who hired her to build a website in both English and Arabic. While that first turn at helming a business no longer makes the cut for her stacked resumé, it gave Ms. Idrees an insatiable taste for running her own show.

Now 26 and an established darling of Canada’s tech-startup community, Ms. Idrees is set to reprise that leading role at Dot Health, a new Toronto-based startup she is bringing to life. Set to launch this month, the company aims to neaten the global mess of disparate patient health records by collating and then putting them directly in the hands – via smartphones, tablets and computers – of patients for a low monthly fee. Read more at The Globe and Mail.

March 2, 2017 – Oil and water don’t mix — in theory. In reality, the two liquids can be almost impossible to separate, especially from complex chemical cocktails such as the wastewater produced by Alberta’s oil sands mining operations.

Contaminated by small amounts of bitumen and other oily substances, this wastewater can’t be discharged to the environment and is held in vast ponds awaiting treatment. A new potential solution developed by U of T Engineering researchers starts with a surprisingly simple device: a sponge.

Pavani Cherukupally (MIE PhD candidate) leads the project under the supervision of Professors Chul Park and Amy Bilton (both MIE). Previous work in Park’s lab focused on designing sponges that could be deployed to soak up oil in the event of a spill — these were made of superhydrophobic materials, which repel water but attract neutrally charged substances like oil.

Cherukupally is modifying the process to treat oil-sands wastewater. Her idea is to pump the the contaminated water through the sponges: due to attractive forces, the oily contaminants should stick to the surface of the sponge, while the clean water should flow straight through.

But when Cherukupally tried this with the superhydrophobic sponges, it didn’t work at all. “The water stayed just as dirty as it was,” she says.

Drawing on her background in physical chemistry, Cherukupally realized that the problem was that oil in wastewater behaves very differently than an oil spill. Oil in wastewater is dispersed into tiny droplets, rather than forming a cohesive slick. Each of these droplets is surrounded by a layer of charged particles, which means that they will be attracted to charged surfaces, not neutral ones.

Cherukupally ditched her neutral, superhydrophobic foams for ordinary polyurethane foam, similar to the type found in couch cushions. When she did, her sponge system removed more than 99 per cent of the suspended oil.

March 2, 2017 – Five U of T students are headed to Shanghai with a single goal: to show that a simple mixture of used coffee grounds, wax and sugar can help restore the dignity of refugees around the world.

Team Moto — named after the Swahili word for fire — is competing on Friday, March 3 in the Shanghai Regionals of the Hult Prize, an annual $1-million competition that aims to create and launch startup enterprises that address challenges faced by billions of people.

This year’s competition focuses on restoring the rights and dignity of people and societies forced into motion due to social injustices, politics, economic pressures, climate change and war. For their design, the members of Team Moto sought to overcome a massive daily challenge faced by residents of African refugee camps: gathering firewood.

“A lot of the time, it’s women and children that are going to harvest firewood,” says Matthew Frehlich (ECE MEng candidate), one of the members of Team Moto. “Because of deforestation, they have to trek up to 15 kilometres to get this firewood. Once they are outside of the camps, they are vulnerable to violence.”

Frehlich and his team members — Rotman MBA candidates Sam Bennett, Gowtham Ramachandran (MIE MEng 1T6), Lucas Siow and Lucy Yang — want to eliminate the need for this dangerous trip. Their solution is a fuel log that could be manufactured from low-cost waste materials repurposed from coffee-drinking countries.

“We came across the original recipe for a coffee-based fuel log on Instagram,” says Frehlich “It was meant to be a decorative holiday log, but we realized it had potential for our purposes because it used a product that would otherwise be discarded as waste, which makes it inexpensive to produce.”

February 23, 2017 – What makes a city tick? Why does it grow the way it does? How is it like other cities and yet unique?

In essence, what is its DNA?

With its forward-pushing Urban Genome Project, the University of Toronto is trying to unravel the urban tangle, with its arterial transportation systems, its cultural and social networks and its sedimentary layers of history, to chart a better way forward for cities in the future.

Led by Mark Fox (MIE), U of T’s distinguished professor of urban systems engineering, and researchers from diverse fields of management, geography, sociology, and architecture, the Urban Genome Project is one of three recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award. The $250,000 in funding from the Connaught Fund will be used by an interdisciplinary team, drawn from U of T’s more than 200 experts in urban issues.

Like the Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced and mapped the complete human genetic blueprint to help solve thousands of diseases, Fox and his right-hand partner on the project, Dan Silver, an associate sociology professor at U of T Scarborough, hope to pinpoint the ground zero of urban challenges and develop specialized solutions, kind of like “a performance enhancing drug” for cities.

New York City. Mumbai. London. Toronto. Lagos. Rio de Janeiro. All cities are different, from history to landscapes to languages spoken.

They’re also the same: economic powerhouses that fuel business, social change and cultural creativity, impacting the lives of the almost four billion people who call them home and everyone else as well.

And beyond the bright lights and teeming streets pulsing with excitement, their streets and neighbourhoods are also where some of the ugliest and most confounding problems of the world are playing out – from rising inequality to political turmoil and transportation gridlock.

“City problems are difficult problems. They’re difficult because they touch so many parts of the city, the people, the organizations that exist in it,” explains Fox, who has a background in artificial intelligence and robotics research.

“I like to think of cities – as a whole – as like a bunch of experiments,” he continues. “Each city itself is an experiment in creating an environment that can sustain that kind of intense, dynamic interaction, constantly creating it over and over again. We, as researchers, want to understand how each of those experiments plays out.”

With the world so dependent on the success of cities, his team wants to know how “if you slightly changed structures in cities,” they might grow and develop in more sustainable, resilient and adaptable ways, he says.

Cities, however, aren’t as abundant as lab rats or fruit flies, and no mayor is going to willingly hand over the keys for an experiment on this scale. Simply observing and cataloguing statistics, which they will also do, is not enough, Fox argues.

That’s why he and his team will eventually take their research and grow their own cities to test their ideas, using the latest advancements in sophisticated artificial intelligence programs. Think SimCity.

“You can really know a lot about cities, but how do you know you really understand them?” asks Silver. “You know you truly understand if you can grow one yourself, so to speak, in an artificial setting.”

But first they need to map the “urban genome” and decipher the unique strands of DNA each city has. These then guide the different pathways a city can develop.

Cities are “terribly complicated, complex systems,” where a seemingly simple change – like adding a high-rise tower or cutting public transportation services – can have rippling, unintended consequences across broad swathes of the overall city ecosystem.

“We always refer to hard things as, ‘It’s rocket science or it’s brain surgery.’ Well  . . . rocket science is simple compared to this,” Fox says. “As an engineer, one of the first things we do is we try and simplify the problem. By design, we remove all the external complexities, whereas what makes cities interesting are those complexities!”

The two researchers, who gleefully finish each other’s sentences like childhood friends, may seem like odd teammates at first. But breaking down academic silos – and those that exist in cities among service departments – is the foundation upon which the project will succeed or fail, they argue.

This is crucial, Fox says, because resolving an urban problem is like playing a game of pick-up sticks. It is virtually impossible to remove a stick from the pile without disturbing another. The problem can’t be solved in isolation.

Think of a beautiful Bernini fountain in Rome. The city sanitation department decides it wants to close the fountain to save money. It’s no longer needed for its original purpose anyway –everyone has indoor plumbing and water at home.

But over centuries the fountain has become a gathering place where information is exchanged, and people make friends and meet future spouses. All the impacts of the fountain closure are not obvious.

If you’re a sanitation engineer or a sociologist sitting alone contemplating the closure “those [other perspectives] aren’t even going to come to you, and if they do, you’re not going to know how to even begin to grapple with them. The complexity of the object requires this complexity of points of view,” Silver says.

Fox and Silver see Mumbai and Toronto on the short list for the first set of cities to study. A global approach is necessary since all cities are interconnected.

“You can’t really understand yourself without looking at others,” Silver says.

Over time, they envision their project – and U of T – as a critical global research hub where other institutions involved in similar studies like the London School of Economics and MIT can share data to build the ‘genome.’

Realizing the sweeping global ambition of the Urban Genome Project will take decades, Fox admits. And if they’re successful and crack the nut, there’s no guarantee city bureaucrats and politicians will listen.

“Politics always trumps reality,” he says, not the least bit dissuaded. “There are a lot of people who are not in any way persuaded by facts. There’s always going to be that issue.”

The application deadline for the next round of funding from the Connaught Global Challenge Award is June 1, 2017.

This story was originally posted on U of T News.

February 23, 2017 – Vanessa Grace Bart-Plange came to Toronto from Ghana four years ago as part of the first wave of MasterCard Foundation Scholars.

In a speech at U of T’s fourth annual MasterCard Foundation Scholars dinner last week, she reflected on her time here – from her first days as a naïve new student on campus to the present.

In her scholarship application, she had written that she wanted to become a professor and improve education and vocational training in her native country to lessen graduate unemployment. And there was the small matter of wanting to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

She said she stills wants to teach at a university and is applying to grad schools.

“As for the Nobel Prize, I have found that each day spent making someone’s life better, whether as a volunteer tutor or an intern at a constituency office at City Hall is a Nobel Prize in and of itself,” she said.

She’s a little closer to accomplishing her goals now, after making the most of her time on campus and studying abroad at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (SciencesPo).

“As I stand here as a scholar with a world-class education about to be released into the world, all I can say is ‘Thank you,’” she said. “This scholarship is not the end but the beginning of greater things to come.”

U of T President Meric Gertler saluted the university’s 52 MasterCArd Foundation Scholars at the dinner Thursday, noting that the graduation of several members of the original cohort marked a milestone for the university.

“Their experiences and their plans are truly inspiring,” he said.

The scholarship was made possible by a $22.8-million grant from the MasterCard Foundation. It covers tuition in the Faculty of Arts & Science or the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, as well as the cost of books, living expenses and airfare. U of T was one of the first Canadian universities, along with the University of British Columbia and McGill University, to partner with the MasterCard Foundation to offer this scholarship.

The foundation’s goals “resonate strongly” with U of T’s own strategic priorities, President Gertler said.

“The program helps equip emerging leaders with the core competencies needed for leadership in a complex, rapidly changing and sometimes turbulent world,” he said. “In turn, our MasterCard Foundation Scholars bring unique perspectives to our campuses, and they enhance our capacity to think and engage on a global level.”

IndE student Sylvia Mwangi, from Nyeri, in central Kenya, was the first in her family to go to university – and if all goes to plan, she will soon be one of the first U of T students to graduate thanks to a MasterCard Foundation scholarship. Partly inspired by one of her favourite courses at U of T, the industrial engineering major wants to improve the processes behind health-care systems.

Read more at U of T News.

February 23, 2017 – An innovative collaboration between graduate and undergraduate students aims to leverage the engineering creative process to address educational challenges, from improving math instruction in high schools to easing anxiety among students transitioning to university.

“Engineers are fundamentally problem-solvers,” says Professor Chirag Variawa, (IndE 1T4) an expert on engineering education and the Faculty’s first Director, First-year Curriculum. “They look at the resources that are available and optimize them to come up with a solution. Education is, in many ways, just another context in which engineering can be performed.”

Variawa is a project manager for APS 112 Engineering Strategies and Practice II, a first-year course in which teams of undergraduate students from different disciplines work together on projects proposed by community partners. Past projects have included optimizing information management in hospitals and designing sustainability features for local buildings.

But Variawa realized that challenges in engineering education would also make good projects for the undergraduate teams to work on. For more input, he turned to students in another course he instructs: APS 1203/1204 Instructional Innovation in Engineering Education, which is aimed at graduate students who are part of the Prospective Professors in Training program or the Collaborative Program in Engineering Education.

“The graduate students see it as a mentoring/coaching enterprise where they get to apply what they are learning in class,” says Variawa. “The undergraduate students see it as an engineering design challenge, with the graduate students as the clients.”

Mechanical engineering PhD candidates Carmen Chui, Justin Boutilier and Bahar Memarian are working with a team of undergraduates to make mathematics instruction more stimulating and engaging for both students and teachers.

“I love math, and I want to change the negative associations that young people sometimes have, to show them how cool and interesting math can be,” says Boutilier.

How the undergraduate students might achieve their objective is still being discussed. “Their generation grew up with mobile technology, such as tablets and smartphones,” says Chui. “It would be interesting if they came up with an app, an electronic learning tool, or something activity-based such as a field trip.”

“It will be nice to see how bringing the real-world applications of mathematics into classrooms could impact student and teacher motivation,” add Memarian. “Students tend to enjoy working on projects and in labs. Mathematics could therefore be viewed and taught in a similar manner as other branches of sciences, such as physics.”

Other proposed challenges include a low-cost platform for teaching coding skills, addressing anxiety in the transition from high school to university and ensuring that students have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

“We’re leaving the design space open,” says Darlee Gerard, a PhD candidate in engineering education and the teaching assistant for APS 1203/4. “It could be an instructional intervention, an online learning tool, a training module or a reusable learning object.”

Though he admits it can be challenging to introduce a project like this for the first time, Variawa is optimistic about what the collaboration may spark. “A teacher is fundamentally a learner as well,” he says. “I love doing these kinds of experiments, and I wouldn’t be doing them if I didn’t think they could work.”

This story is the fourth in a five-part #RisingStars series on U of T Engineering News, highlighting the work of our early career professors.

February 17, 2017 – Canada will spend $125 billion on infrastructure maintenance and expansion in the next 10 years. Professor Fae Azhari (MIE, CivE) is helping stretch those dollars farther by keeping our buildings, bridges, roads and reservoirs safe and structurally sound for longer.

Azhari’s research focuses on structural health monitoring. Just as you visit the doctor for periodic check-ups, structures need their health checked too — but instead of blood tests and heart rate measurements, engineers usually perform visual inspections and spot-checks with sensors and instruments.

“The problem with visual inspections is that they’re pretty subjective, and with periodic monitoring, you can miss certain events or failures,” says Azhari. “Now we’re moving toward continuous monitoring by incorporating permanent sensors on important structures to get real-time data.”

Degradation or damage suffered between inspections can have catastrophic consequences. In June 2013, a rail bridge just outside of downtown Calgary partially collapsed as a train was passing over it. The train, carrying flammable and toxic liquids, derailed. Emergency measures were taken to prevent the railcars from falling into the Bow River, which was running high with summer floodwater. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada determined that floodwaters had eroded the soil around the bridge’s foundations, causing the collapse. This loss of sediment from around foundational supports is called scour.

“Believe it or not, this happens very often, especially in North America and some Asian countries,” says Azhari. “Scour is a huge problem.”

For her PhD research at the University of California, Davis, Azhari tackled scour from a new angle: she took commercially available sensors that measure dissolved oxygen, typically used for agriculture or biological applications, and used them for sensing scour. Azhari’s design was to attach a number of oxygen sensors at increasing depths along the buried length of the bridge pier. If the pier is properly buried, the dissolved oxygen levels detected by the sensors should be very low — but as scour erodes the sediments and exposes the sensors to flowing water, the dissolved oxygen levels rise. As scour progresses, more and more sensors become exposed, indicating how badly scour is threatening the bridge’s structural integrity.

She has also worked on concrete sensors, including a design that integrates conductive carbon fibers and nanotubes into concrete, making it a self-sensing material. Measuring the resistance across the material reveals the stresses and strains on it. “This technology is well-proven in the laboratory, but moving it to the field is a big challenge,” says Azhari.

As she builds her research enterprise, Azhari plans to collaborate across disciplines and with key partners who could benefit from her sensors, as well her analysis and insight into the data that comes from them. “Transportation infrastructure, utilities, dams, power plants, wind turbines — basically any engineering system — needs maintenance and monitoring,” she says.

“It’s very important to get these sensors from prototype to implementation, and I want to work on that.”

February 14, 2017 – MIE Professor Mark Fox’s team is among three from U of T Engineering sharing $750,000 in funding from the recently relaunched Connaught Global Challenge Award.

The internal award, funded by the Connaught Fund, is designed to support new collaborations involving leading U of T researchers and students from multiple disciplines, along with innovators and thought leaders from other sectors.

This funding boost will help these programs get off the ground and help them find major new external funding to further develop solutions to the global challenge, forge important new partnerships with other internationally renowned universities and government agencies, as well as possibly create new research-oriented academic programs.

“I’d like to congratulate all of the recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s Vice-President of Research & Innovation. “These projects all tackle immensely important and complicated global problems. The Connaught Fund understands that to find solutions, it needs to provide funding to support interdisciplinary collaboration at U of T. Each of our teams is committed to expanding connections with faculty in relevant divisions across all three campuses.”

The recipients of this year’s Connaught Global Challenge Award are:

• “The Urban Genome Project” led by Mark Fox (MIE), U of T’s distinguished professor of urban systems engineering. The team includes U of T researchers with expertise in history, big data and transportation from the Rotman School of Management, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Faculty of Arts & Science and the University of Toronto Scarborough.
• “The Information Technology, Transparency, and Transformation (IT3) Lab” led by Professor David Lie (ECE). The team includes fellow U of T researchers from the Faculty of Law and Rotman School of Management, as well as collaborators from Princeton University, Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, Google, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and more.
• “Network for Engineering Education for Sustainable African Cities (NEESAC)” led by Professor Brent Sleep (CivE). The team includes U of T researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Faculty of Arts & Science, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, as well as collaborators from the University of Victoria, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, a number of African institutions and more.

Read more about the Urban Genome Project

To be considered, Global Challenge teams must represent new collaborations involving leading U of T researchers and students from multiple disciplines, along with innovators and thought leaders from other sectors. Each year, up to $750,000 will be awarded to a maximum of three applications.

This story originally appeared on U of T News.

February 13, 2017 – As a first-year student in U of T Engineering, Jennifer (Yewon) Son never imagined that she and her classmates would come to the rescue of hundreds of thousands of priceless works of literature.

“We came up with some crazy plans, and then tried to make them implementable,” remembers Son. “To think that something we did as first-year students is actually being put into action — I was amazed.”

Son is one of six students who designed a way to prevent rising humidity levels in the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for a first-year assignment in 2014. Now, three years later, retrofits to the library inspired by that assignment are underway.

Hear Son discuss the project on CBC’s Metro Morning

The Fisher Library is a purpose-built wing of the Robarts Library that houses rare book and archival material dating back to 1789 B.C., much of which can be seen in the towering stacks that line the interior walls. The Fisher is the only library in Canada to count all four of Shakespeare’s 17th century folios among its collection — the first folio is one of only 234 known copies in the world.

In 2004, the library’s insulation began to fail. On days when the temperature outside dropped below -20 C, the cold transferred through the concrete, causing condensation to form between the building’s inner and outer walls. Despite the Fisher’s preservation-quality HVAC system, the additional moisture caused rising humidity levels and created conditions for mold, a serious threat to the collection.

“Mold forming on the collection can damage it, and once it happens, it will always happen,” said John Toyonaga, Manager of the Binding Section and head of disaster planning for the library. “Controlling the environment is key to keeping the collection safe.”

Between 2004 and 2013, Toyonaga and Fisher Library staff consulted with building engineers, property managers and architectural firms — all recommended that the library be reinsulated from the inside. This would require removing the entire collection to a safe, climate-controlled space, then moving it back after the installation. Each move would risk damage to the collection, and the library would have to close during the moves and renovations. Adding an additional level of complexity, the Robarts Library is a listed heritage property by the City of Toronto — this meant that any solution had to preserve an exterior appearance consistent with the building’s 1973 aesthetic. “We were in a tough situation,” recalls Toyonaga.

Running out of options, he and his team turned to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering and its first-year Engineering Strategies and Practices (ESP) course.

“It’s a learning course, and the primary foci are on design and communication,” said Professor Jason Bazylak (MIE), who has coordinated the course since 2009. “The final report they submit should be sufficient that the client can implement their work with minimal additional engineering input.” Spanning fall and winter terms, the course introduces students to the engineering design process before assigning them challenges presented by real clients from industry and the community.

Through collaborative group work and ongoing consultations with their clients, students identify client needs, develop a number of solutions, find the strongest one and present it to their client. Son and her classmates Michael Lancaster (MechE 1T7 +PEY), Jackie Lunger, Toby (Yishun) Ou, Alice Wolfe (MechE 1T7 + PEY) and Tom Zhang were assigned the Fisher Library as a client in January 2014.

“I was excited when I first read the problem statement for the project,” says Lancaster. “You don’t often get the opportunity to work on a project with a significant real-world impact in a university course.”

The team explored more than 50 ideas before settling on their final solution: installing a heated envelope and insulated external surface over the existing concrete, with a finishing layer that replicates the current appearance.

“What these students came up with was an ingenious solution to the problem,” said Toyonaga. “It solved the issues with the collection, having to close the library and the heritage matter as well. Everybody kept telling me that it couldn’t be done, you had to insulate from the inside. But these students came up with multiple solutions.”

After submitting their final proposal in April 2014, the team continued on with their studies but Toyonaga and library administration moved the project forward. Over the next two years, the concept to repair the building from the outside received approvals from the University’s administration and architectural firms were brought in to draft models and ensure the idea would work. After adjustments to the design, in November 2016 — nearly three years after the students were first assigned the project — the retrofits to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library began. Construction is scheduled to be complete in March 2017.

“They approached it as a project and got a great learning experience, and we got an elegant solution,” said Toyonaga. “Some of the brightest minds in the city are just down the street — our answer was there all along.”