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147 Projects

  • Canada
  • 2022

10
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  • Funder: EC Project Code: 824160
    Overall Budget: 4,206,390 EURFunder Contribution: 4,188,890 EUR

    EnTimeMent aims at a radical change in scientific research and enabling technologies for human movement qualitative analysis, entrainment and prediction, based on a novel neuro-cognitive approach of the multiple, mutually interactive time scales characterizing human behaviour. Our approach will afford the development of computational models for the automated detection, measurement, and prediction of movement qualities from behavioural signals, based on multi-layer parallel processes at non-linearly stratified temporal dimensions, and will radically transform technology for human movement analysis. EnTimeMent new innovative scientifically-grounded and time-adaptive technologies operate at multiple time scales in a multi-layered approach: motion capture and movement analysis systems will be endowed with a completely novel functionality, achieving a novel generation of time-aware multisensory motion perception and prediction systems. The proposed model and technologies will be iteratively tested and refined, by designing and performing controlled and ecological experiments, ranging from action prediction in a controlled laboratory setting, to prediction in dyadic and small group interaction. EnTimeMent scenarios include health (healing and support of everyday life of persons with chronic pain and disability), performing arts (e.g. dance), sports, and entertainment group activities, with and without living architectures. EnTimeMent will create and support community-building and exploitation with concrete initiatives, including a community of users and stakeholders, innovation hubs and SME incubators, as premises for the consolidation beyond the end of the project in a broader range of market areas.

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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009958/1
    Funder Contribution: 9,854 GBP

    BBSRC : Andra-Maria Ionescu : BB/M011208/1 Back pain has long been recognised as the most significant cause of 'years lived with disability' in countries around the world, including in both the UK and Canada. Degeneration of the intervertebral disc (IVD) is the leading cause of back pain. The healthy IVD a soft, hydrated tissue located between the vertebrae in the spine which allows flexibility and protects the spine from damage during loading. The tissue is protein-rich, with relatively few cells. With degeneration the function of the cells changes, leading to a change in the tissue including a loss of hydration and disc height that ultimately causes back pain. Despite the enormity of the problem there are no long-term successful treatments and hence new areas of collaborative research are required in order to better understand the disease processes and develop novel therapies. This project will allow a new collaboration to be formed in order to investigate an important unstudied area of IVD research; whether they way in which cells handle amino acids might cause disease and whether 'rescue' of amino acid handling might have potential as a treatment for IVD degeneration and back pain. To initiate this area of research the current project will investigate amino acid handling in skeletal muscle, a tissue in which the mechanisms of amino acid handling are better understood. Amino acids are the main 'building blocks' of proteins and have an important role in the maintenance of skeletal muscle mass. Of these, the essential amino acid leucine, is particularly responsible for the activation of new muscle protein production. Therefore, it is thought that the transport of leucine into skeletal muscle may be pivotal role in the activation of muscle protein gain and thus, these could be essential for maintaining skeletal muscle mass and function with ageing and disease. Leucine transport is coordinated predominantly by two transporters, called LAT1 (L-Type Amino Acid Transporter 1) and SNAT2 (sodium-coupled neutral amino acid transporter 2); however the full importance of these transporters to skeletal muscle size and protein production is unknown. As well as leucine, other amino acids, such as arginine, glycine and methionine are also believed to activate the processes which increase muscle protein production. Therefore, if leucine transport is impaired, or leucine availability is low, these amino acids may have a compensatory effect on muscle protein production and cell size. Thus, the aim of this project will be to determine how inhibiting the leucine transporters LAT1 and SNAT2 affects leucine transport, cell size and protein production in muscle cells. Furthermore, we will then aim to understand whether high amounts of glycine, arginine and/or methionine can rescue any damaging effects of LAT1/SNAT2 inhibition. The results of this investigation will provide vital information on how leucine transport and protein production are controlled in skeletal muscle cells. It would also advise on what nutritional strategies to use to enhance muscle protein production in cases where there is a lack of leucine or reduced leucine transport. The knowledge gained from the study will also then be translated across from Canada to the UK to initiate a new area of collaborative international research into study of amino acid handling in the IVD which has the potential ultimately to revolutionise treatment of back pain and thereby alleviate the associated impact of the disease to both countries.

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  • Funder: WT Project Code: 215695
    Funder Contribution: 835,847 GBP

    We are proposing a new and innovative precision approach to the identification of severe infections and sepsis in children. This data-driven approach to diagnosis will overcome many of the limitations of current expert opinion-based triage guidelines. Smart technology has the potential to overcome the barrier of limited clinical expertise in the identification of the child at risk. This mobile health platform, with sensors and data-driven applications, will provide real-time individualised risk prediction to facilitate timely and effective targeted treatment at first contact, regardless of location. This low-cost technology will provide rapid triage in remote areas globally where specialists are not regularly available. We will trigger rapid, highly effective and low-cost interventions such as antibiotics, fluid, oxygen therapy and other special investigations to children determined to be most at risk of sepsis, based on data-driven prediction. Thus, these innovations will improve timely access to life-saving treatments for children in the poorest countries where deaths from infection and sepsis are common. Children in poor families or in populations marginalized by health and social inequities are especially vulnerable to infections. In these children, infection is a major contributor to disability and years of life lost and has a great economic and social cost. Sepsis is the leading cause of death and disability in children, every hour of delay in treatment is associated with greater organ damage and ultimately death. The challenges, especially in poor countries, are the delays in diagnosis and the inability to identify children in urgent need of treatment. To circumvent these challenges, we propose the implementation and evaluation of a trigger tool that will reduce the time to diagnosis and prompt the timely initiation of life-saving treatment. The key innovations are 1) a data-driven approach to rapid diagnosis of sepsis severity and 2) a low-cost digital tagging system to track the time to treatment. The tool will require minimal cost, clinical expertise and training or time to use. The tool will identify high risk children and reduce time to treatment. Our mobile platform (mobile device and dashboard) will create a low-cost, highly scalable solution for children with sepsis.

    more_vert
  • Funder: NIH Project Code: 5R01CA080728-20
    Funder Contribution: 210,799 USD
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  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014547/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,366 GBP

    NERC : Liam Lachs : NE/S007512/1 Coral reefs face unprecedented declines and ecological changes worldwide due to the impact of humans. This is particularly worrying as coral reefs support fisheries and tourism livelihoods, they act as a coastal protection from storms, and also harbour unique biodiversity. Even when local disturbances like fishing or nutrient enrichment are banned, mass coral bleaching events have still occurred on a global scale. This is caused by severe marine heatwaves. As the oceans heat up due to climate change, marine heatwaves become ever more frequent and last for longer periods. Without action, the socio-ecological services provided by coral reefs may be lost within 3-5 decades due to climate change. Unfortunately, the global reduction in carbon emissions needed to slow the greenhouse effect and mitigate these ecological impacts is going to be very difficult to achieve under current agreements like the Paris Agreement. Therefore, it is now critical to consider how active management interventions can be used to support the resilience of coral reefs in the future. CORALASSIST, our lab group in Newcastle University, United Kingdom, is working on this topic. We are testing coral restoration techniques combined with selective breeding using naturally heat tolerant corals. We are gaining new insights on the physiological and genomic basis for heat tolerance in individual corals, but how can this benefit an entire coral reef ecosystem? The proposed collaboration with the Climate and Coastal Ecosystem Laboratory (CCEL), University of British Columbia, Canada, will aim to answer this question. CCEL are a group of global climate modelling and coral experts, an area that is lacking from our UK research group. This collaboration will integrate the individual-level scientific knowledge from CORALASSIST into larger spatial population modelling frameworks. We will use a suite of global climate projections from climate modelling centres across the world (IPCC), combined with historical temperature data and CORALASSIST data, to do 3 main tasks. 1) We will develop a downscaled sea surface temperature (SST) projection for Palau, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean. 2) We will use this SST projection to understand the future trajectory of Palauan coral reefs under different climate scenarios. 3) We will simulate coral restoration efforts in order to provide useful advice to coral reef managers, such as "how soon and how many heat-tolerant corals are needed to benefit coral reef ecosystems in the long-term". In addition to this, we will conduct 2 short visits to disseminate our research to the wider scientific community, but also to gain valuable ideas from other scientists. The Baum Lab in University of Victoria will give an entire ecosystem view of modelling, whilst the Bay Lab in University of California Davis will provide expert knowledge on integrating genetic data into coral population adaptation models.

    more_vert
  • Funder: SNSF Project Code: 194337
    Funder Contribution: 106,350
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014172/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,241 GBP

    In recent years, there has been a tremendous shift in the use of digital technologies in work, with the internet becoming a key facilitator in the organisation of work itself. This includes "on-demand work", a locally place-based form of work in which 'self-employed' workers are hired using digital platforms (or applications) to carry out in-person services on a per-gig basis. The on-demand economy now has an expanding global presence, with the growing and widespread use of ridesharing platforms such as Uber and Ola, food-delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Zomato and home-task platforms such as TaskRabbit and Housekeep. On-demand work has proliferated largely in urban spaces across the globe, with the growing recognition that digital platforms are transforming the nature of cities. As platform enterprises become more embedded in the fabric of cities, the resulting flexibilization of work has phenomenal impacts on urban residents. With numerous legal cases emerging worldwide to understand whether these service platforms are in fact employers or 'aggregators' linking customers to a 'service provider' as they claim, the relevance of understanding the relationship between platforms and the urban space is now more prominent, than ever. The significance of this project is rooted in its aim to develop new, relevant and nuanced understandings of the changing nature of urban space and work as a result of the growing prominence of on-demand platforms in cities, an integrated perspective which is missing from scholarly literature. Developing a new theory to integrate the co-extensive phenomena of platform urbanism and on-demand work will provide relevant and applicable ways for scholars and practitioners to understand the contemporary social relations of cities and urban denizens. Analysing numerous cases of platform economy manifestations, and mobilizing postcolonial and feminist approaches to think about on-demand service platforms in urban spaces, the project seeks to provide insights into a more egalitarian and less-exploitative platform politics, recommending ways in which labour rights including security and welfare can be 'built into' these platforms in different contexts. Developing nuanced narratives and addressing approaches required for different types of work platforms - e.g. transport, food-delivery, domestic work, care work, home services - the project will present recommendations in the form of a whitepaper brief which will be submitted for publication with the Centre for International Governance innovation (CIGI). This can be taken up by scholars, practitioners, government and other experts in the three areas that the research will be primarily focused on and that the researchers have links to - Canada, the UK and India. Providing contextual comparisons and insights from these contexts will contribute to an understanding of how cities across the globe are changing, and how Canada's cities can learn from, or provide learnings to, others. Working with Dr Leszczynski - whose current SSHRC-funded work looks at on-demand service platforms in the Canadian context - will facilitate cross-comparison insights through which we can use examples from outside of Canada to understand the contemporary transformations of Canadian cities. It will also enable me to take learnings from the Canadian context, which can be applied to cities in UK and India.

    more_vert
  • Funder: NIH Project Code: 5U01AA026101-02
    Funder Contribution: 178,999 USD
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: ES/T015195/1
    Funder Contribution: 133,706 GBP

    Increasing concerns over the environmental impact of plastic single-use packaging have reached a critical juncture. Mumbai-one the largest cities in India-implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags, plastic cups and plastic bottles, with a stiff penalty (5000 rupees) or up to three months in jail for those vendors caught selling these products (Dhillon, 2018). From a corporate initiative, IKEA, has recently adopted biodegradable packaging made from mycelium (mushroom), which mimics the texture of polystyrene (Lempert, 2018). With growing awareness of the negative environmental impacts of petroleum-based packaging, the trend towards adopting bio-based products has increased. Currently, the highest demand for bio-based packaging is situated within the food industry. In a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, it is claimed that biodegradable packaging is good for the economy and the environment. However, while bio-based packaging may be seen as a "disruptive innovation", there is a lack of studies exploring the social and environmental implications of this product. For example, bioplastic packaging is hard to distinguish from its plastic counterpart, resulting in contamination and waste management issues at a municipal level (UNEP, 2015). As such, the adoption of this product becomes a "wicked problem" as it is seemingly impossible to solve due to the numerous interdependent factors that simultaneously impact solutions. To address this issue, four research partners consisting of the UK, Canada, Brazil and Poland, will implement four collaborative social innovation labs. A social innovation methodology is critical to better understand how bio-based packaging innovation will impact the environment and diverse stakeholders across the supply chain, especially as it relates to food security, waste infrastructure, formal and informal waste collectors, consumers, vendors, food producers, and policymakers.

    visibility181
    visibilityviews181
    downloaddownloads146
    Powered by Usage counts
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: EP/R042578/1
    Funder Contribution: 1,178,040 GBP

    Many applications of THz radiation require sources that are compact, low-cost, and operate at room temperature. In this project, a low-noise optically-controlled THz array antenna system will be developed, addressing a significant barrier in the adoption of THz technology. We will demonstrate a novel 'system on a chip', integrating a thin film antenna array, photodiode array, semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) array and optical beam forming network. The SOA array enhances the pump power and ensures all array elements are evenly pumped. The beam former is used to control the phase difference between the THz radiation from different THz antennas, and thus scanning of THz beam can be realized. A THz repetition frequency mode-locked laser will be used as the light source to lock the phase of optical signals in the chip, greatly reducing the linewidth of the THz emission. The advantages of this THz emitter system include a high peak intensity due to radiation from the antennas combining coherently, room temperature operation, continuous-wave operation, compact form factor, and a narrow steerable beam. The sources will be assessed for use in systems for high-bandwidth wireless communications and for medical imaging.

    visibility18
    visibilityviews18
    downloaddownloads529
    Powered by Usage counts
    more_vert
Advanced search in
Projects
arrow_drop_down
Searching FieldsTerms
Any field
arrow_drop_down
includes
arrow_drop_down
The following results are related to Canada. Are you interested to view more results? Visit OpenAIRE - Explore.
147 Projects
  • Funder: EC Project Code: 824160
    Overall Budget: 4,206,390 EURFunder Contribution: 4,188,890 EUR

    EnTimeMent aims at a radical change in scientific research and enabling technologies for human movement qualitative analysis, entrainment and prediction, based on a novel neuro-cognitive approach of the multiple, mutually interactive time scales characterizing human behaviour. Our approach will afford the development of computational models for the automated detection, measurement, and prediction of movement qualities from behavioural signals, based on multi-layer parallel processes at non-linearly stratified temporal dimensions, and will radically transform technology for human movement analysis. EnTimeMent new innovative scientifically-grounded and time-adaptive technologies operate at multiple time scales in a multi-layered approach: motion capture and movement analysis systems will be endowed with a completely novel functionality, achieving a novel generation of time-aware multisensory motion perception and prediction systems. The proposed model and technologies will be iteratively tested and refined, by designing and performing controlled and ecological experiments, ranging from action prediction in a controlled laboratory setting, to prediction in dyadic and small group interaction. EnTimeMent scenarios include health (healing and support of everyday life of persons with chronic pain and disability), performing arts (e.g. dance), sports, and entertainment group activities, with and without living architectures. EnTimeMent will create and support community-building and exploitation with concrete initiatives, including a community of users and stakeholders, innovation hubs and SME incubators, as premises for the consolidation beyond the end of the project in a broader range of market areas.

    visibility304
    visibilityviews304
    downloaddownloads186
    Powered by Usage counts
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/V009958/1
    Funder Contribution: 9,854 GBP

    BBSRC : Andra-Maria Ionescu : BB/M011208/1 Back pain has long been recognised as the most significant cause of 'years lived with disability' in countries around the world, including in both the UK and Canada. Degeneration of the intervertebral disc (IVD) is the leading cause of back pain. The healthy IVD a soft, hydrated tissue located between the vertebrae in the spine which allows flexibility and protects the spine from damage during loading. The tissue is protein-rich, with relatively few cells. With degeneration the function of the cells changes, leading to a change in the tissue including a loss of hydration and disc height that ultimately causes back pain. Despite the enormity of the problem there are no long-term successful treatments and hence new areas of collaborative research are required in order to better understand the disease processes and develop novel therapies. This project will allow a new collaboration to be formed in order to investigate an important unstudied area of IVD research; whether they way in which cells handle amino acids might cause disease and whether 'rescue' of amino acid handling might have potential as a treatment for IVD degeneration and back pain. To initiate this area of research the current project will investigate amino acid handling in skeletal muscle, a tissue in which the mechanisms of amino acid handling are better understood. Amino acids are the main 'building blocks' of proteins and have an important role in the maintenance of skeletal muscle mass. Of these, the essential amino acid leucine, is particularly responsible for the activation of new muscle protein production. Therefore, it is thought that the transport of leucine into skeletal muscle may be pivotal role in the activation of muscle protein gain and thus, these could be essential for maintaining skeletal muscle mass and function with ageing and disease. Leucine transport is coordinated predominantly by two transporters, called LAT1 (L-Type Amino Acid Transporter 1) and SNAT2 (sodium-coupled neutral amino acid transporter 2); however the full importance of these transporters to skeletal muscle size and protein production is unknown. As well as leucine, other amino acids, such as arginine, glycine and methionine are also believed to activate the processes which increase muscle protein production. Therefore, if leucine transport is impaired, or leucine availability is low, these amino acids may have a compensatory effect on muscle protein production and cell size. Thus, the aim of this project will be to determine how inhibiting the leucine transporters LAT1 and SNAT2 affects leucine transport, cell size and protein production in muscle cells. Furthermore, we will then aim to understand whether high amounts of glycine, arginine and/or methionine can rescue any damaging effects of LAT1/SNAT2 inhibition. The results of this investigation will provide vital information on how leucine transport and protein production are controlled in skeletal muscle cells. It would also advise on what nutritional strategies to use to enhance muscle protein production in cases where there is a lack of leucine or reduced leucine transport. The knowledge gained from the study will also then be translated across from Canada to the UK to initiate a new area of collaborative international research into study of amino acid handling in the IVD which has the potential ultimately to revolutionise treatment of back pain and thereby alleviate the associated impact of the disease to both countries.

    more_vert
  • Funder: WT Project Code: 215695
    Funder Contribution: 835,847 GBP

    We are proposing a new and innovative precision approach to the identification of severe infections and sepsis in children. This data-driven approach to diagnosis will overcome many of the limitations of current expert opinion-based triage guidelines. Smart technology has the potential to overcome the barrier of limited clinical expertise in the identification of the child at risk. This mobile health platform, with sensors and data-driven applications, will provide real-time individualised risk prediction to facilitate timely and effective targeted treatment at first contact, regardless of location. This low-cost technology will provide rapid triage in remote areas globally where specialists are not regularly available. We will trigger rapid, highly effective and low-cost interventions such as antibiotics, fluid, oxygen therapy and other special investigations to children determined to be most at risk of sepsis, based on data-driven prediction. Thus, these innovations will improve timely access to life-saving treatments for children in the poorest countries where deaths from infection and sepsis are common. Children in poor families or in populations marginalized by health and social inequities are especially vulnerable to infections. In these children, infection is a major contributor to disability and years of life lost and has a great economic and social cost. Sepsis is the leading cause of death and disability in children, every hour of delay in treatment is associated with greater organ damage and ultimately death. The challenges, especially in poor countries, are the delays in diagnosis and the inability to identify children in urgent need of treatment. To circumvent these challenges, we propose the implementation and evaluation of a trigger tool that will reduce the time to diagnosis and prompt the timely initiation of life-saving treatment. The key innovations are 1) a data-driven approach to rapid diagnosis of sepsis severity and 2) a low-cost digital tagging system to track the time to treatment. The tool will require minimal cost, clinical expertise and training or time to use. The tool will identify high risk children and reduce time to treatment. Our mobile platform (mobile device and dashboard) will create a low-cost, highly scalable solution for children with sepsis.

    more_vert
  • Funder: NIH Project Code: 5R01CA080728-20
    Funder Contribution: 210,799 USD
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014547/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,366 GBP

    NERC : Liam Lachs : NE/S007512/1 Coral reefs face unprecedented declines and ecological changes worldwide due to the impact of humans. This is particularly worrying as coral reefs support fisheries and tourism livelihoods, they act as a coastal protection from storms, and also harbour unique biodiversity. Even when local disturbances like fishing or nutrient enrichment are banned, mass coral bleaching events have still occurred on a global scale. This is caused by severe marine heatwaves. As the oceans heat up due to climate change, marine heatwaves become ever more frequent and last for longer periods. Without action, the socio-ecological services provided by coral reefs may be lost within 3-5 decades due to climate change. Unfortunately, the global reduction in carbon emissions needed to slow the greenhouse effect and mitigate these ecological impacts is going to be very difficult to achieve under current agreements like the Paris Agreement. Therefore, it is now critical to consider how active management interventions can be used to support the resilience of coral reefs in the future. CORALASSIST, our lab group in Newcastle University, United Kingdom, is working on this topic. We are testing coral restoration techniques combined with selective breeding using naturally heat tolerant corals. We are gaining new insights on the physiological and genomic basis for heat tolerance in individual corals, but how can this benefit an entire coral reef ecosystem? The proposed collaboration with the Climate and Coastal Ecosystem Laboratory (CCEL), University of British Columbia, Canada, will aim to answer this question. CCEL are a group of global climate modelling and coral experts, an area that is lacking from our UK research group. This collaboration will integrate the individual-level scientific knowledge from CORALASSIST into larger spatial population modelling frameworks. We will use a suite of global climate projections from climate modelling centres across the world (IPCC), combined with historical temperature data and CORALASSIST data, to do 3 main tasks. 1) We will develop a downscaled sea surface temperature (SST) projection for Palau, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean. 2) We will use this SST projection to understand the future trajectory of Palauan coral reefs under different climate scenarios. 3) We will simulate coral restoration efforts in order to provide useful advice to coral reef managers, such as "how soon and how many heat-tolerant corals are needed to benefit coral reef ecosystems in the long-term". In addition to this, we will conduct 2 short visits to disseminate our research to the wider scientific community, but also to gain valuable ideas from other scientists. The Baum Lab in University of Victoria will give an entire ecosystem view of modelling, whilst the Bay Lab in University of California Davis will provide expert knowledge on integrating genetic data into coral population adaptation models.

    more_vert
  • Funder: SNSF Project Code: 194337
    Funder Contribution: 106,350
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: NE/T014172/1
    Funder Contribution: 13,241 GBP

    In recent years, there has been a tremendous shift in the use of digital technologies in work, with the internet becoming a key facilitator in the organisation of work itself. This includes "on-demand work", a locally place-based form of work in which 'self-employed' workers are hired using digital platforms (or applications) to carry out in-person services on a per-gig basis. The on-demand economy now has an expanding global presence, with the growing and widespread use of ridesharing platforms such as Uber and Ola, food-delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Zomato and home-task platforms such as TaskRabbit and Housekeep. On-demand work has proliferated largely in urban spaces across the globe, with the growing recognition that digital platforms are transforming the nature of cities. As platform enterprises become more embedded in the fabric of cities, the resulting flexibilization of work has phenomenal impacts on urban residents. With numerous legal cases emerging worldwide to understand whether these service platforms are in fact employers or 'aggregators' linking customers to a 'service provider' as they claim, the relevance of understanding the relationship between platforms and the urban space is now more prominent, than ever. The significance of this project is rooted in its aim to develop new, relevant and nuanced understandings of the changing nature of urban space and work as a result of the growing prominence of on-demand platforms in cities, an integrated perspective which is missing from scholarly literature. Developing a new theory to integrate the co-extensive phenomena of platform urbanism and on-demand work will provide relevant and applicable ways for scholars and practitioners to understand the contemporary social relations of cities and urban denizens. Analysing numerous cases of platform economy manifestations, and mobilizing postcolonial and feminist approaches to think about on-demand service platforms in urban spaces, the project seeks to provide insights into a more egalitarian and less-exploitative platform politics, recommending ways in which labour rights including security and welfare can be 'built into' these platforms in different contexts. Developing nuanced narratives and addressing approaches required for different types of work platforms - e.g. transport, food-delivery, domestic work, care work, home services - the project will present recommendations in the form of a whitepaper brief which will be submitted for publication with the Centre for International Governance innovation (CIGI). This can be taken up by scholars, practitioners, government and other experts in the three areas that the research will be primarily focused on and that the researchers have links to - Canada, the UK and India. Providing contextual comparisons and insights from these contexts will contribute to an understanding of how cities across the globe are changing, and how Canada's cities can learn from, or provide learnings to, others. Working with Dr Leszczynski - whose current SSHRC-funded work looks at on-demand service platforms in the Canadian context - will facilitate cross-comparison insights through which we can use examples from outside of Canada to understand the contemporary transformations of Canadian cities. It will also enable me to take learnings from the Canadian context, which can be applied to cities in UK and India.

    more_vert
  • Funder: NIH Project Code: 5U01AA026101-02
    Funder Contribution: 178,999 USD
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: ES/T015195/1
    Funder Contribution: 133,706 GBP

    Increasing concerns over the environmental impact of plastic single-use packaging have reached a critical juncture. Mumbai-one the largest cities in India-implemented a ban on single-use plastic bags, plastic cups and plastic bottles, with a stiff penalty (5000 rupees) or up to three months in jail for those vendors caught selling these products (Dhillon, 2018). From a corporate initiative, IKEA, has recently adopted biodegradable packaging made from mycelium (mushroom), which mimics the texture of polystyrene (Lempert, 2018). With growing awareness of the negative environmental impacts of petroleum-based packaging, the trend towards adopting bio-based products has increased. Currently, the highest demand for bio-based packaging is situated within the food industry. In a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, it is claimed that biodegradable packaging is good for the economy and the environment. However, while bio-based packaging may be seen as a "disruptive innovation", there is a lack of studies exploring the social and environmental implications of this product. For example, bioplastic packaging is hard to distinguish from its plastic counterpart, resulting in contamination and waste management issues at a municipal level (UNEP, 2015). As such, the adoption of this product becomes a "wicked problem" as it is seemingly impossible to solve due to the numerous interdependent factors that simultaneously impact solutions. To address this issue, four research partners consisting of the UK, Canada, Brazil and Poland, will implement four collaborative social innovation labs. A social innovation methodology is critical to better understand how bio-based packaging innovation will impact the environment and diverse stakeholders across the supply chain, especially as it relates to food security, waste infrastructure, formal and informal waste collectors, consumers, vendors, food producers, and policymakers.

    visibility181
    visibilityviews181
    downloaddownloads146
    Powered by Usage counts
    more_vert
  • Funder: UKRI Project Code: EP/R042578/1
    Funder Contribution: 1,178,040 GBP

    Many applications of THz radiation require sources that are compact, low-cost, and operate at room temperature. In this project, a low-noise optically-controlled THz array antenna system will be developed, addressing a significant barrier in the adoption of THz technology. We will demonstrate a novel 'system on a chip', integrating a thin film antenna array, photodiode array, semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) array and optical beam forming network. The SOA array enhances the pump power and ensures all array elements are evenly pumped. The beam former is used to control the phase difference between the THz radiation from different THz antennas, and thus scanning of THz beam can be realized. A THz repetition frequency mode-locked laser will be used as the light source to lock the phase of optical signals in the chip, greatly reducing the linewidth of the THz emission. The advantages of this THz emitter system include a high peak intensity due to radiation from the antennas combining coherently, room temperature operation, continuous-wave operation, compact form factor, and a narrow steerable beam. The sources will be assessed for use in systems for high-bandwidth wireless communications and for medical imaging.

    visibility18
    visibilityviews18
    downloaddownloads529
    Powered by Usage counts
    more_vert