Social Issues

This project aims to develop methods and software for performing spatio-temporal analysis of cancer incidence and smoking data in Ontario over long time periods with high spatial resolution. This will allow changes of cancer incidence over time to be better understood, and accommodate rare cancers that require long study periods in order to accumulate data. Because of small counts common to small area analysis, computationally intensive Bayesian inference methods will be needed.

This research develops a comprehensive methodology for the integrated optimization and control of human-friendly robotic technology that will be applied for the advanced healthcare and biomedical manipulation. Some original ideas, methods and algorithms are proposed in this research based on several novel mathematical models, which will benefit the development of general robotics in the direction of safety with high performance to human beings.

A major pharmaceutical intervention for management of many infectious diseases is the use of antiviral drugs. However, the rise of drug resistance poses significant threats to the effectiveness of drugs. This research proposes to determine optimal treatment strategies, through the development of population dynamical models for disease transmission and control, which can minimize the effect of resistance emergence in the population. This work will primarily focus on influenza infection, which still inflicts substantial morbidity, mortality, and socioeconomic costs worldwide.

Using modern statistical measurement error methodologies and analysis, we aim to efficiently and accurately discover and characterize predictive models of responses associated with abnormal growth development in young children and adults. This proposal is unique in scope and vision by addressing health issues that threaten the sustainability of the health care system.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important medical imaging technology for clinical diagnostics. However, its slowness in data acquisition poses major problems in practice. In recent years, many research efforts to accelerate MRI data acquisition were based on the compressed sensing (CS) theory. CS is effective for signals that have highly sparse representations. However, it suffers from high computational complexity and lack of performance stability.

Design, build, and program a small mobile robot at the University of Alberta that can interact successfully, without supervision, with members of the public visiting the Courage Center at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. Robotics is playing an increasing role in multiple aspects of rehabilitative medicine, including prosthetics, mobility aids, and patient-adapted physical therapy. The Courage Center is a new facility for demonstrating and showcasing such applications of technology in rehabilitative medicine to the public.

Due to the explosive growth in the technology for manufacturing integrated circuits, modern chips contain millions of transistors. Using sophisticated optimization algorithms, it is possible to achieve notable increases in the performance of the chips, reduce the manufacturing costs, and produce faster, cheaper computing for society. Thus, the objective of this project is to enhance the solution of large-scale optimization problems arising in these applications.

Bacterial biofilms are microbial depositions on immersed surfaces and are ubiquitous in natural and engineered environments. For example, they play a significant role in medical applications where they can grow on artificial implants and cause infections; they form dental plaques and contribute to tooth decay; they can be utilized to assist in clean-up of contaminated soils or groundwater aquifers; they accelerate corrosion of metal surfaces; and they are a main culprit behind contamination of drinking water systems and food processing equipment.

In today’s highly connected world in which data is so easy to collect, search, and transfer, privacy is of increasing importance. Unfortunately, the way most communication happens today - particularly over the Internet - is quite privacy unfriendly. When you send email, use instant messaging, or simply browse the world-wide web, information about you and your actions gets disseminated to diverse parties around the world, and you have little, if any, control over it.