TORONTO, June 29, 2017 − The University of Waterloo and 91��ɫ have been awarded a grant from the to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past.

The grant, valued at $610,625, supports Archives Unleashed, a project that will develop web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars and librarians to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web. It is additionally supported by generous in-kind and financial contributions from Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, 91��ɫ Libraries and the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts.������

“We want to unleash web archive collections by allowing scholars and curators to systematically filter, aggregate, analyze, and visualize content,” says Professor, the project lead and expert in digital history at the University of Waterloo’s Department of History. “The sheer volume of cultural information generated online over the past 20 years presents exciting opportunities for historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars.”

, digital assets librarian at 91��ɫ and lead developer on the projects, says it will be a sea change for digital historians. “The systems we are building will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students, researchers, librarians and archivists to use web archives in their work,” says Ruest. “It is absolutely critical that these systems exist so that more researchers can truly examine this abundance of web archival data.”

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco non-profit that started in 1996 and currently holds over 30,000 terabytes or 30 petabytes of archival content, a staggering amount of online data that continues to grow exponentially. While public institutions such as university libraries work with the Internet Archive to collect websites of institutional or researcher interest, the current tools for web archive searches are difficult for most people to use and often require prior knowledge of a specific URL, explains Milligan. “Scholars send a request for archival data and get file formats they may not understand. For many, it’s a very slow page-by-page search. So the barriers to entry in this field of digital history are really high.”

Accessing and analyzing large web archives are currently prohibitive challenges for most researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Milligan and his co-Principal Investigators, Ruest and Professor and David R. Cheriton Chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, aim to change this.

The three-year Archives Unleashed project has three major thrusts: First, the project will build a software toolkit that applies modern big data analytics infrastructure to scholarly analysis of web archives. Second, the toolkit will be deployed in a cloud-based environment that will provide a one-stop portal for scholars to ingest their collections and execute a number of analyses with the click of a mouse. Finally, datathons — or hackathons — will build a cohesive and sustainable user community by bringing the core project team members together with librarians, archivists, and other interested researchers.

Explains Professor Lin, “The only way to handle the immense size of typical web archives is to distribute processing tasks over computer clusters. For companies such as Google and Facebook, such infrastructure is taken for granted by legions of data scientists. One of the goals of this project is to bring these capabilities into the hands of historians and other humanities scholars.” The project aims to build on the Apache Spark data processing platform; and, in turn, all tools developed by the project will be released under an open-source licence and shared with the community.

Ultimately, scholarly analyses will feed into visualizations that allow researchers to interactively explore the data — for example, the network of hyperlinks between sites. “Network visualizations will help you see what kind of news outlets a political party tended to link to from their website during the last election,” says Milligan. “Or, every time the Conservatives talked about Justin Trudeau, you can find out what kinds of words and adjectives they used.”

Ruest will focus on a full-stack implementation, building the canonical cloud implementation, ensuring the system is secure, and designing the interface for both data contributors and users.

The project will also seek to expand partnerships with institutions such as universities and government departments. “We really want to enable Canadian partners to take their rich library collections and make them accessible — searchable, with downloadable data and ways to interactively explore the content,” says Milligan. “In the next decades, more historians, librarians, legal researchers, political scientists, sociologists — anyone who wants to work with big data sets — will benefit from this project in being able to unleash their web archives.”

91��ɫ is known for championing new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-discipline programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 26 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 295,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contacts
Janice Walls, Media Relations, 91��ɫ, 416 455 4710, wallsj@yorku.ca

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Part of $120M multi-partner investment in 91��ɫ U’s VISTA program

TORONTO, September 8, 2016 - Today, 91��ɫ’s world class expertise in vision research is being recognized by the government of Canada with the nation’s most prestigious research grant. A $33.3 million (CFREF) grant will support the (VISTA) program. The investment supports research across a wide range of applications of vision science, from basic visual function, to computer vision and object recognition, and more.

Judy Sgro, MP, Humber River-Black Creek was joined by 91��ɫ’s Vice President of Research and Innovation, Rob Haché, and 91��ɫ’s VISTA program scientific director, Doug Crawford, to announce the $33.3 million boost.

“The Liberal government is committed to science based policy because we know that good science informs good policy and good policy delivers positive results for all Canadians,” said MP Sgro, “Today is a real world example of what that commitment means right here at home. This funding will advance Canada's global leadership in vision research and in doing so promises long-term economic benefits for all of us.”

“We are delighted that the federal government has selected 91��ɫ’s VISTA project for support through the CFREF,” said Mamdouh Shoukri, President and Vice-Chancellor of 91��ɫ, “Our Centre for Vision Research is an international leader in the field, and an excellent example of the kind of innovation that can be achieved through high-level collaboration across many disciplines. This investment will allow our globally renowned researchers to continue their important work in advancing discovery in vision technologies and biological and computational vision.”

91��ɫ’s VISTA program will contribute to the next generation of industry-ready highly qualified personnel for Canada, supporting 226 additional graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.

"Today’s investment builds on 91��ɫ's existing global leadership in vision research, and will help take us to the next frontier in vision science at the interface between humans and technology,” said Haché, “This research builds on two of 91��ɫ's major intersecting pillars of research excellence - biological and computational vision - and will lead to human-centred computer vision applications that seamlessly interact with the real world to improve health, safety, productivity and quality of life."

“I am thrilled by the Canadian government’s announcement of funding for 91��ɫ’s VISTA program,” said Crawford, “We have grown to rank in the top 5 in the world, and offer uniquely integrated strengths in both biological and computational vision. I look forward with great enthusiasm to reaching new heights of discovery and application for Canadian vision research.”

When fully ramped up, VISTA will include more than 50 partner organizations, 30 Canada Research Chairs and equivalents, eleven additional core faculty members, and 48 associated faculty members.�� The investments for VISTA, including 91��ɫ and partner funding will total more than $120 million.

��is known for championing new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Through cross-discipline programming, innovative course design, diverse experiential learning and a supportive community environment, our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 295,000 alumni.

Media contact:

Barbara Joy, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-736-2100 x55593/ barbjoy@yorku.ca

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TORONTO, April 27, 2016 – There is currently a major bottleneck in the development of biopharmaceuticals – drugs manufactured from biological sources – but 91��ɫ U researchers in partnership with Canadian pharmaceutical companies have received more than $1.7 million to speed things along.

The funding, from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Development fund, includes industrial and in-kind contributions and will help advance the R&D of biopharmaceuticals.

Biopharmaceuticals represent the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry, but there is a major delay in their development. Due to technological limitations and the molecular complexity of biopharmaceuticals, important details such as what a drug-target complex looks like are usually not available. This makes it difficult for companies to decide whether or not to pursue further testing of candidate drugs and it slows down drug development.

“We will develop a platform to rapidly determine detailed information about biologic drug candidates, including the nature of these molecules and specifically how they interact with their targets,” said 91��ɫ U researcher and project lead , director of the Centre for Research in Mass Spectrometry. “Creating such a platform will allow pharmaceutical companies to greatly accelerate and improve the quality of their drug discovery and development processes, making it easier to bring much needed drugs to market.”

Wilson, along with science Professors and Chun Peng have the bioanalytical and research expertise to help. Together with Sanofi-Pasteur, Sciex, and Fluidigm Canada, they are launching the “Technology- Enhanced Biopharmaceuticals Development and Manufacturing” initiative, which will aim to improve tests for early-stage candidate drugs.

The researchers are experts in the techniques required to carry out this project. The mass spectrometry and electrophoresis technologies that will provide the unique analytical backbone for the platform are products of Wilson’s and Krylov’s research programs. Peng will contribute her unique expertise to projects related to microRNA-driven immunomodulation, which will provide insights into vaccine development. From the industry perspective, Sanofi will share its drug development systems, Sciex will contribute its world-leading mass spectrometry instruments, and Fluidigm will offer their unique CyTOF technology.

“The project will enhance 91��ɫ’s research profile in biopharmaceuticals development and manufacturing and provide an exceptional, industry-linked training environment for graduate students and post-docs,” said Robert Haché, 91��ɫ’s Vice-President Research & Innovation. “In addition, the technology and training that will emerge from this collaboration will meet the needs of the growing Canadian biopharmaceuticals industry.”

has always been known for championing new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our 52,000 students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world.�� Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-discipline programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and our 283,000 alumni worldwide push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide.

Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ, 416-736-2100 ext. 22097, sandramc@yorku.ca

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