Canada Foundation for Innovation Funds Seven Innovative Projects at Carleton

CFI JELF funds equipment and facilities to mobilize knowledge, encourage innovation and commercialization, and train the talented minds of the next generation.

The total of $1,308,710 awarded by CFI will contribute to seven projects and will support the labs and equipment needed to advance their innovative research. CFI funding represents up to 40 per cent of total project costs, with additional funds anticipated from other sources.

See how the funding will benefit the recipients’ projects:

Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly important in Canada’s transition to a low carbon economy. Testing new EV powertrains is slow and costly, since each design normally needs a physical motor to validate.

“This project advances national emission-reduction targets via efficient, reliable and sustainable EV technologies,” Dhulipati said.

Dhulipati’s team is developing a Power Hardware-in-the-Loop (PHIL) Electric Machine Emulation Laboratory that uses power electronics and real-time simulation to reproduce the behaviour of an electric machine. Inverters, controllers and battery systems can be tested against different machine designs and operating conditions without building a new motor each time, making it practical to evaluate low-cost designs that use fewer or no rare-earth magnets.

In addition to lowering the cost and environmental footprint of EV manufacturing, this project will help strengthen Canada’s EV supply chain and accelerate the adoption of sustainable transportation technologies, creating high-skill jobs and channeling results to industry. 

Shared decision making is one approach to person-centred care and supports care providers and individuals seeking care to work together to make informed decisions. Emerging digital technologies such as extended reality (XR) offer new opportunities to enhance care provider training and support more person-centred care interactions.

This project will develop and evaluate shared decision-making interventions for care providers working with Inuit communities, with a focus on XR. An interdisciplinary team of Carleton researchers, community-based researchers, care providers and Inuit community members who have lived experience of care systems will create virtual, augmented and mixed reality tools and approaches that support shared decision making.

Through the living lab, researchers, care providers and community members will work collaboratively to create immersive training experiences, simulations and interactive tools that support relationally accountable care and strengthen care provider capacity for shared decision making.

The project will also generate knowledge to inform changes in care practices and systems, while establishing new approaches for the collaborative development, evaluation and implementation of innovative training tools that can be adapted for use across care settings in Canada and with international partners.

Extreme climate events such as wildfires can significantly reduce indoor air and environmental quality (IAQ/IEQ), which can have wide-ranging negative consequences for occupant health and well-being. Despite the prevalence of public health guidance and consumer-grade technologies to mitigate indoor exposures during wildfires, actual occupant behaviours during extreme climate events remain largely understudied. Lozinsky’s project strives to better understand the impact of building owner and occupant behaviours and technology usage patterns, and their subsequent impact on IEQ, during extreme climate events.

Lozinsky will use a combination of airflow measurement devices, field-grade IEQ sensors and wearable technologies to evaluate the efficacy of IAQ/IEQ technologies and occupant adaptive behaviours in maintaining healthy indoor conditions during extreme climate events.

The results of this work will not only improve existing technologies, but also their wide-scale adoption and implementation, and will have far-reaching benefits for Canada and other countries facing poor IEQ during climate stressors.

Canada’s healthcare system is facing a growing crisis, with over 600,000 people awaiting surgery and 1.5 million awaiting diagnostic care. With an ageing population, the demand for surgical procedures will continue to rise.

This project, led by a team of researchers from the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, will lay the foundation for the next generation of surgical robots guided by ultrasound imaging. By integrating advanced environment sensing capabilities, imaging and intelligent algorithms, the research team aims to create surgical robots that are more adaptive than current systems while increasing precision.

The system will surpass the precision of current surgical robots while, for the first time, integrating new sensors and algorithms to improve imaging, navigation and accuracy. The resulting medical technology could improve surgical efficiency and help reduce wait times, improving patient outcomes and positioning Canada for the next generation of surgical robots.

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) gain traction across research disciplines, there is a growing need for secure, high-performance computing infrastructure capable of supporting research involving sensitive data.

This project, led by researchers from Carleton’s Faculty of Engineering and Design and Faculty of Science, will establish a shared computing cluster that enables interdisciplinary researchers to test advanced AI models.

The Carleton Computational Cluster for Sensitive Data (3C-SD) will provide researchers with the shared computing infrastructure required to develop, train and evaluate AI and ML tools and models for research involving sensitive data. The infrastructure will support diverse research areas that address important societal challenges, including education, healthcare and accessibility, while providing training opportunities for the next generation of researchers in AI and ML.

The initiative will strengthen Canada’s AI and ML research capacity and support the development of specific AI-based tools to improve services for vulnerable populations.

Multi-agent artificial intelligence learning algorithms have demonstrated impressive results in simulated environments but have yet to see widespread adoption in large-scale real-world environments. Current approaches typically demand vast amounts of data and computing resources, and their complexity can increase dramatically as the number of agents grows, stalling deployment in large-scale real-world applications.

Subramanian’s team will use new high-performance computing infrastructure to develop novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms that are faster and more sample efficient.

“These advances will be evaluated on high-impact applications such as wildland firefighting, materials discovery and autonomous driving,” Subramanian said.

This research will train graduate students in advanced artificial intelligence methods that are in strong demand, strengthen Canada’s leadership in artificial intelligence and deliver significant benefits across multiple sectors. Subramanian aims to share resulting methods and software with the broader research community and transfer the knowledge to industry partners for real-world deployment.

Many Canadians experience muscle loss or reduced mobility as a result of injury, disease or aging, and have limited options for restoration. Garces’ team will acquire melt electrowriting (MEW) infrastructure to create advanced synthetic muscles with muscle-like performance.

Using innovative fabrication techniques, Garces’ team will design microscopic muscle-like structures that can contract, sense movement and perform many of the same functions as real muscle tissue.

“The development of customizable, implantable synthetic muscles has the potential to enable muscle replacement, rehabilitation, functional augmentation and repair, addressing critical unmet needs across a range of neuromuscular conditions,” Garces said.

The proposed infrastructure will facilitate interdisciplinary research spanning advanced manufacturing, materials science and biomedical engineering.

More Carleton research news:

• Three Carleton Community Members Appointed to the Order of Canada
• Canada Research Chair Awarded Funding to Advance Low-Carbon Technologies