The work of the 2012 Teron Scholars displays the art and science of architecture.

This year’s Teron Scholars were presented with their awards by William Teron, founder of the Teron Group of Companies and the “father of Kanata.” Five students were awarded prizes with a further three receiving honorary mentions.

To kick off a new academic year in the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, provide inspiration to future Scholars, and recognize the achievements of this year’s winners, the awards were presented at the Director’s All-School Welcome on September 4, 2012.

Since the Teron Scholar program began in 2007, the annual awards have challenging students in the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism to hone the skills needed to become multidisciplinary lead architects.

Students in any year of study can tailor a studio project identified by a professor as a Teron contender, and submit it for critical review by distinguished members of the Ottawa architecture community. The winners, judged on five critical disciplines (physical, social, environmental and economic dimensions and imagineering), display a holistic approach to architecture.

“I am amazed at the work of these young students,” says Teron, honorary fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and officer of the Order of Canada. “The honourable mentions go to students who show potential, to encourage their talent. The Scholars’ work though, adds magic.”

The winning submissions

Iva Mihaylova design for the Canada Council for the Arts includes an archive tower with large sliding walls through which the general public can see the stored art and a cantilevered auditorium extending slightly over the outdoor public garden.

Inspired by artist Lee Bontecou, Sam Smallwood designed The People’s Eye, a pavilion that twirls skyward. With a dome opening radially and 18 extending solar-panel equipped arms, it evokes the opening of an eyelid, with eyelashes and a pupil for the acceptance of light.

Vance Fok designed ARK 1, the Arctic Centre for Research & Knowledge (Generation 1), as a modular research centre to be shipped and assembled in the ice fields on the border of Yukon and Alaska. The ARK container carries the materials for the building and is then adapted to create the structural frame of the building itself.

Abbi Kusch designed Urban Burrow, a self-dependent, primarily public and environmentally conscious community combining a community centre, library, boat club and residential complex.

Matthew McKenna’s Sussex Drive bookstore plays on the model of an art gallery, featuring a curated book collection for selective exhibitions or sales and gathering space for lectures, forums and public events.

Competitors are challenged to create concepts that reflect Electrolux heritage of Scandinavian design while creating new home appliances that stimulate, engage and enlighten all of our senses.

Sitnikova’s product Melodi is a device designed to allow the other senses help in the task of measuring liquids for the more than 39 million people worldwide who are legally blind. As liquid flows through the funnel opening, sensors gauge the flow rate — and the fun begins. A musical scale allows the user to know how much liquid has been poured. When you are not using it, the compact Melodi is easily stored. Melodi not only liberates those with limited sight, it also brings music and laughter to everyday kitchen tasks, creating a completely different sensual cooking experience for all users alike.

Taking a project from concept to commercial application is a long process. Tom Skinner is helping Carleton students get an early start.

Tom Skinner, MEng/72, has donated funds to run a two-year pilot project that will help engineering students begin to commercialize a fourth-year group project.

Capstone courses yield a constant stream of innovative projects. The challenge is capitalizing on that intellectual investment and moving it toward marketable solutions. By creating an intense summer fellowship program, a team of four students can refine and further develop a project with access to a technician and equipment.

“In grad school, or a fourth-year project, you finish up a project for grading and move on. I want students to have the chance to take it further—to take a term paper or project and develop it into something with a practical use,” he says.

Skinner himself did just that. He returned to university, working on his master’s degree initially as a part-time student, after working for Bell Northern Research, Nortel’s precursor.

“I needed to expand my engineering capability for what I wanted to do,” he says. “I never wanted to work for anybody. I wanted to be doing things for myself and making my own judgments. I wanted to test it out myself.”

After graduation, Skinner co-founded JSI Telecom, a manufacturer of equipment to intercept and analyze electronic transmissions. His ambition and love of the business led to more than 30 years of success. Now retired as chairman, Skinner can still be found in the Kanata office most days, acting as a corporate soundboard.

“I hope the commercialization summer fellowship helps develop the mindset that you’re not finished when you’ve solved the technical problems. You keep going,” Skinner says. “Solving problems is only a third of the way—it’s the start of a process to develop and bring a product to market.”

Taking MuscleMate farther

Polar, a heart-rate monitor manufacturer, turned a bulky medical device into a wireless, wearable personal fitness tool. Now a team of student inventors hopes to do the same for a muscle activity monitor.

As a tool for self-diagnosis or rehabilitation, the device, dubbed MuscleMate, could help people in physiotherapy to measure their progress, stroke victims to recover muscle function, body builders to target specific muscles, or amputees to control prosthetics.

“We proved the concept by using muscle signals to control a video game, but our product has potential beyond entertainment,” says team member Mark Klibanov.

“The commercial potential for the project is high, because the uses of the technology are so varied, and because there is no competing cost-effective solution in the marketplace yet,” says project supervisor Leonard MacEachern, associate professor of Electrical Engineering.

Amrita Sandhu and Mark Klibanov work on the proof-of-concept device that detects electrical signals generated by muscles in the wearer’s arm.

Klibanov, Musabbir Khan, Amrita Sandhu and Nick Stupich created MuscleMate for their fourth-year electrical engineering project. Worn like a blood-pressure cuff, Muscle­Mate uses electromyography (EMG) to detect tiny electrical signals generated by muscles in the wearer’s arm. Analog circuitry amplifies the signal and filters out atmospheric signals (such as from nearby lights). A microprocessor then converts the biological analog signal into a digital one, sending it wirelessly to a smartphone or computer. From there, gesture recognition software detects intensity and frequency of the impulses to determine strength and actions such as wrist turning. In the current video game application, relaxing and contracting the muscle bobs a helicopter over and under hazards.

After winning the Department of Electronics Best Presentation and Best Poster awards, the Carleton University IEEE Student Best Paper Award, and the Eastern Ontario Regional IEEE Student Best Paper Award, the MuscleMate team was chosen as the first recipient of the Carleton University Capstone Award. Thanks to the financial support of donor Tom Skinner, the Capstone Award will fund the MuscleMate team over the summer term to turn the project into a commercial venture.

“It would be hard to find a summer job where I could learn more than this,” says Stupich who, after investing about 40 hours a week into the project since January, is committed to see how far the team can take it. “The combination of working with hardware and software, of an electronics team on a biomedical project, was
appealing from the start. We’re making something genuinely cool.”

“My goal in conceptualizing capstone projects is to come up with projects that I wish I could have worked on for my final-year project!” says MacEachern. “Commercial potential and design economics are always a consideration, since we are doing real engineering design in these projects. This year the students have been given an excellent and truly amazing opportunity through the Capstone Award.”

For the team, the challenges over the summer include eliminating the sticky connections between the monitor and the user’s skin, and stream­lining the design—“The cuff needs to be clean enough to wear without looking like a cyborg,” says Stupich.

“Basically, everything needs to be made smaller,” says Klibanov. “At this intermediate stage of development, we can use larger components to prove reliability, but to go to market with a useable, competitive product, we need to replace the circuit board with a microchip.”

For the students, preparing to graduate and take on the opportunity of a start-up company is exciting. With MuscleMate’s novel gesture recognition and a price tag that currently is 10 times less than portable EMG systems, the young entrepreneurs are well positioned to make a commercial breakthrough.

“We’ve been given the chance to really go for it over the next four months,” says Stupich. “We want to get MuscleMate to market.”

That discovery was named as one of the top 50 inventions of the year by Time Magazine and copped a prize worth $100,000 U.S.

“It has been almost four years since that discovery, so this shows prime numbers of this size are very rare and requires a lot of computation power to find,” says Gilchrist.

But fame is fleeting and Gilchrist quickly got back to his real work. As a doctoral student in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, he spent the last several years completing his dissertation and will be graduating on June 7.

Under the supervison of Dr. Monique Frize, distinguished professor of engineering at Carleton, and their physician partner Dr. Erika Bariciak, a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), he helped to develop models that could accurately estimate the risk of mortality in babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). He was also co-supervised by Dr. Colleen M. Ennett who received her PhD in Engineering from Carleton and is now working for Philips Research North America, located in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Explains Gilchrist: “With the entire system put together, physicians and clinical staff in the NICU can obtain a mortality risk estimation of individual patients using the most up-to-date data as it comes in from the patients and provide a result in less than a second.”

Part of his thesis involved researching new methods to collect, store, and retrieve clinical data found in a hospital environment in real-time, processing data as it is received. The Clinical Data Repository (CDR) that was developed can collect and store data from patient monitors and laboratory results using free, open-source tools. It is compatible with industry standard protocols, and will allow upgrades and the development and use of third party tools to access the CDR more easily.

Gilchrist points out that the design of the CDR protects patient privacy by automatically segregating private patient information from the raw research data before it is stored.

He says that obtaining his PhD has been a very rewarding experience.

“I have been able to work on practical research and come up with new approaches to solve some challenging medical problems that are being used right now in a hospital, analyzing real medical data from actual patients there. These types of medical challenges cannot be solved by engineers working in a research lab in isolation, so it was wonderful to work collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, and engineers right from the beginning in order to truly understand the issues at hand.”

Gilchrist says he was originally inspired by Dr. Frize when he first took a course from her during his master’s degree at Carleton and is now delighted to continue working with her after he graduates. He will also continue to research at CHEO with Dr. Bariciak. “We hope to be able to advance our research even further and look at more medical conditions beyond the current mortality risk estimations,” says Gilchrist.

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The four-man Carleton Free Flight team placed first at the annual Canadian Aeronautical and Space Institute (CASI) Free Flight Glider Competition this spring. The three-day event challenged teams from Ryerson University, University of Manitoba, University of Toronto and Carleton University to design and build a free flying (uncontrolled) glider, judged on design and presentation (written and oral reports) and flight performance.

Carleton’s glider, the Lammergeier, named after the soaring bird, featured a 2.8-meter wing span and 1.3-m fuselage, both of composite construction. The design utilized carbon fibre, Kevlar, and fiberglass over a foam and balsa core. The Lammergeier reached altitudes in excess of 55 meters and braved strong winds on the first day. After a number of over-spec landings, the team had an opportunity to practice their ingenuity while performing field repairs and returned triumphant on the third day.

The trophy will be on display at the CASI office in Ottawa and a keeper trophy and prize money has been presented to the team.  The team wishes to thank their sponsors and all who helped make the project a success!

Ontario undergraduate students were encouraged to put their minds to work on developing innovative, cost-effective, and practical solutions to accessibility-related issues. The province-wide initiative is organized by the Council of Ontario Universities, with support from the Government of Ontario.

Chi was recently at Carleton to meet with a small group of entrepreneurial students who pitched him ideas about growing new companies.

Read more in Carleton Now.

Hear the pitches:

Fraser grew up asking questions like − ‘How do nerve cells in the human brain process information?’

“I wanted to pursue a career that would allow me to combine technology and medicine,” says Fraser. So he decided to apply to Carleton’s Master’s of Applied Science (MASc) program in Biomedical Engineering. The main objective of this degree is to enhance students’ abilities to solve biological and medical problems through the application of engineering principles.

Fraser adds: “This program gives me a perfect opportunity to develop a background in working with biological signals and signal processing. These techniques are applicable to a wide variety of problem areas and are useful in continuing research in biomedical engineering.”

His present research looks at developing software that can be used by medical professionals to analyze data associated with muscle contractions.

Electromyograph signals (sEMG) are a measure of the electrical activities associated with muscle contractions. These signals are used to aid in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders, to control powered prosthetic limbs, or used in fatigue studies in exercise science, for instance.

Fraser points out that there can be a large source of error unless personnel in the medical settings are specifically trained in sEMG acquisition, especially since there is no universally used software to acquire and validate sEMG.

“We are hoping that by developing our software for CleanEMG, we can remove much of the uncertainty associated with sEMG acquisition and make it easier and less costly to acquire clean, reliable sEMG signals,” says Fraser. CleanEMG is an ongoing research collaboration between Carleton University and the University of New Brunswick to develop an open-source, user-friendly software tool to quantify noise in sEMG.

Fraser’s supervisors are Adrian Chan and James Green. “Both are very down-to-earth, very approachable and extremely knowledgeable in their areas,” says Fraser. “They are great researchers and both have received awards for teaching with the latest (and perhaps most prestigious) being Adrian’s 3M teaching award.”

Carleton’s MASc degree in Biomedical Engineering is a joint program between Carleton and the University of Ottawa, offered through the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Biomedical Engineering (OCIBME). This is one of 12 joint institutes between Carleton and the U of O. OCIBME includes relevant engineering and science programs at Carleton.

Fraser says: “Biomedical Engineering at Carleton is great in that it is diverse enough that you have the freedom to select any courses that fit your interests and/or research area. It has a weekly seminar component where you get to listen to speakers talk about their research in biomedical engineering and learn more about just what is going on in the field. This is a perfect way to develop and appreciate the breadth of research that is done.”

He also would like to encourage undergrad students who are interested in the biomedical field to look into the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) program. “It is an excellent opportunity to work with a professor and gain research experience during the summer. They pay you for your work as well so it really is a good experience. This is what I did the summer before I started grad school and it really helped me get acquainted with the professors that I would be working with and the type of work I would be doing.”

More information about all of our Joint Institutes can be found here.

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