Sometime in autumn 2023, a parachute will deposit a canister that will land in a Utah desert. Inside it will be rock samples from an asteroid called Bennu, with an orbit mostly situated between Earth and Mars. This operation has a lot to do with 91��ɫ’s expertise and leadership in space science and engineering.

Bennu, roughly the height of a skyscraper at 500 metres in diameter, is interesting in many ways. For one thing, it poses a disarmingly real threat to us. It orbits close to Earth every six years and many space scientists believe there’s a small chance it could strike our planet in the next century.

This aside, Bennu has a deeper value. It could contain clues about the origin of the solar system – including our planet and every living being on it. (As Joni Mitchell put it so aptly in her song Woodstock, “We are stardust…”)

The rock samples are being brought to us courtesy of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and by the technical expertise of 91��ɫ’s Michael Daly, a professor of Earth and Space Sciences in the Lassonde School of Engineering.

Daly, director of 91��ɫ’s Centre for Earth and Space Science, has been working with the Canadian Space Agency since 2008 on developing the OSIRIS REx Laser Altimeter, an instrument to map the surface of Bennu.

“I developed the concept for the instrument, a very early part of the design. I put the plan together for analyzing the data and how we were going to observe the asteroid to capture the scientific information we required,” he explains.

Daly, 91��ɫ Research Chair in Planetary Science, and his colleagues had to consider a multitude of challenges. Can you get there easily? Does the asteroid spin slowly enough that you could touch down and collect a sample? Can you get the sample back?

Thanks to Daly’s mapping, the team discovered that Bennu has a very rocky surface and the researchers were able to locate a smooth area, the size of a few parking spaces, where the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft could sample.

The plan worked. The spacecraft extracted samples and is soon to make its way back to Earth. Daly is thrilled. Even though the bumpy surface threw a temporary wrench into their plans, “these surprises are valuable because you’ve learned something unexpected,” he says.

Daly is one of a growing community of scholars at 91��ɫ that focuses on every aspect of space and how it all came to be. This work has contributed to an increasing buzz among space experts around the world.

“91��ɫ is very strong in space. I don’t think there’s any rival in Canada,” says Canada Research Chair in Planetary Science and Lassonde Professor Isaac Smith, who joined 91��ɫ in 2018, having come from the renowned Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

Smith was surprised by the reaction from friends when he first arrived in Toronto. “My neighbours asked what I did for a living. I told them I’m a planetary scientist at 91��ɫ… they didn’t even know the University had a space program.”

After earning his master’s in physics, Smith toured the American west where he became fascinated by geology, rock formations and deserts. He then applied that interest to the planet closest to us: Mars.

“Mars has always been part of humankind’s fascination. We grew more interested when the first telescopes made people wonder if there might be water and even life, in some form.”

While life has not been found, the idea of it continues to tantalize scientists.

“Mars’ geology is remarkably similar to our planet. I could take a picture of the Utah desert, and find another picture from a rover on Mars, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

But Smith isn’t focused on the ages-old question of life on Mars. Instead, he wants to understand how the planet was born, how it has evolved. He believes this has a lot to do with ice.

“The story of Mars is incomplete if you don’t talk about ice. There’s ice all over the planet. In the past, it was water, and this shaped many of the landforms – giant canyons and glaciers, created 100 million years ago. The ice and water are important in the formation of Mars. I want to understand more,” he explains.

91��ɫ Research Chair in Space Exploration Professor John Moores is also fascinated with planets. A professor in Earth and Space Science Engineering at Lassonde, he says the focus of his research group is to use what they learn in planetary science to support space missions.

Moores has a special interest in the red planet – especially the mysterious presence of methane. The gas was detected by Curiosity, the NASA rover that has been on Mars since 2012. Methane is produced by numerous natural, biological processes on Earth – from fossil fuels to cow flatulence. “We understand why it’s present on Earth, but we don’t expect it on Mars. To understand why it’s there, we need more data,” says Moores.

As much as Mars, Bennu, Earth and the ever-expanding universe is a mystery, there’s one force that unifies it all: dark matter. Professor Sean Tulin believes it’s at the root of, well, everything.

“Dark matter is the biggest missing piece of the puzzle we have in astrophysics,” says Tulin, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and Canada Research Chair in Particle Physics and Cosmology. “It’s easy to think, ‘There’s this mysterious substance in space that doesn’t impact what we do.’ But it provides the cosmic foundation for the entire structure in the universe, all the galaxies, and how they’re organized and how they form.

“Think of a birthday cake,” he suggests. “The regular matter – the planets and the stars – are the frosting but the dark matter’s the cake.”

Tulin uses mathematical calculations to investigate the properties of dark matter, then shares his ideas and predictions with astronomers to test them.

“The universe is about 14 billion years old. For about 10 billion of those years, it was dominated by dark matter. If we want to understand what the universe looks like, we have to understand the properties of dark matter. We still don’t. We can’t see it with telescopes. It’s a huge challenge to try to figure this out.”

And why is all this research so valuable?

Tulin says “We can use space as a laboratory for understanding the fundamental properties of nature.”

Smith explains “I’m motivated to share what I learn with students and the public. Helping them feel that wonder and amazement energizes me to learn and share more, do more research.”

Daly elaborates “Space exploration helps us to put ourselves in context in the universe. We’re part of something much bigger than Earth. And if we don’t explore space, I think we lose some of our basic humanity.”

Moores agrees. “By studying ancient environments on other planets we are able to get a better idea of how life originated on our own world, and how our own planetary systems, such as the climate, will change over time. This new knowledge about these wonders will expand our conception of what’s possible and how we fit into this vast cosmic dance.”

To learn more about Daly, visit his . For more on Tulin, see his . To learn about Smith’s work, visit his . For more on Moores, visit his .

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at ; watch our new , which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.

Paul Fraumeni is an award-winning freelance writer, who has specialized in covering university research for more than 20 years. To learn more, visit his .

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In 2019, then PhD candidate Anne Thaler secured a VISTA postdoctoral fellowship and joined Professor and Canada Research Chair Nikolaus Troje’s BioMotionLab at 91��ɫ and the Centre for Vision Research. She has a compelling research focus: She studies realistic virtual characters in virtual reality (VR) and related perception around these animated characters.

With collaborators, including Troje and researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Tübingen (Germany), she recently wrote a short fascinating paper, “Attractiveness and Confidence in Walking Style of Male and Female Virtual Characters,” for the 2020 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. Here, she investigated how perceived attractiveness and confidence relate to body shape and walking motion of these virtual characters.

“Our results indicate that attractiveness and confidence relate both to the shape and walking motion of animated characters,” she says. “This finding has important implications for virtual character animation.”

This is an exciting new area of research. Animated virtual characters are, or course, key components in many VR environments, from interactive computer games to training modules, and much progress has been made in developing 3D, life-like faces and body shapes over the last two decades.

But there’s not much research on biological and personality inferences made from the shape and motion of these virtual characters' bodies. This work fills an important void.

“Human motion is rich in socially relevant information, such as a person’s identity, health and biological sex. Humans are extremely sensitive to animate motion patterns and highly efficient in extracting information encoded in these patterns,” Thaler explains.

Study participants looked at 100 walkers, and rated their attractiveness and confidence

To undertake this research, Thaler and team generated virtual characters by reconstructing body shape and walking motion from optical motion capture data. Interestingly, they used the walking motions of 50 men and 50 women from the bmlRUB database – a database collected by the BioMotionLab. Each walker’s body shape and walking motion was reconstructed using the MoSh algorithm developed by the collaborators at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen.

These 100 characters (stimuli) were presented to the study participants in three different ways:

1. As a 3D virtual character with each actor’s shape and walking motion (Walking Meshes);
2. As a walking stick figure with lines connecting 15 skeletal landmarks (Walking Stick Figures); and
3. As a 3D virtual character in a static pose (Static Meshes).

The ‘walkers’ were presented such that they walked directly towards the study participant from four meters away in the virtual environment. The static virtual characters were placed 3.5 metres in front of the participant and were displayed for the same duration as the walking motion of each actor.

Next, the study participants rated how they perceived these characters on a six-point Likert scale. This is a kind of questionnaire that provides a series of answers that go from one extreme to another – from “strongly agree” at one end to “strongly disagree” at another end and less extreme choices in the middle. A Likert scale is particularly useful to researchers because it allows them to collect data that provides nuance and insight into participants’ perception. This data is quantitative and can easily be analyzed statistically.

In the first experiment, 40 study participants (20 female, 20 male) rated the attractiveness of the 100 characters from ‘1’ – not attractive, to ’6’ – very attractive. In the second experiment, another 36 participants (18 female, 18 male) rated the characters’ confidence from ‘1’ – not confident, to ‘6’ – very confident.

Findings consider differences in walking style of males and females

In addition to determining that attractiveness and confidence relate both to the shape and walking motion of animated characters, as noted, the researchers also discovered something about sexual dimorphism in walking style – that is, the difference in walking style between males and females.

They found that sexual dimorphism in walking style seems to play a different role in attributing biological and personality traits to male and female virtual characters.

More specifically, they determined that sexual dimorphism in walking was more important for female attractiveness, whereas increased vertical motion was important for male attractiveness. Interestingly, the opposite was true for perceived confidence.

“These results are important to consider in applications using animated virtual characters because inferences made from the character’s appearance and motion could influence the user’s behaviour,” Thaler says.

Thaler earned her PhD from the University of Tübingen in 2019. Her dissertation examined self-body perception in ecologically valid scenarios using VR and novel computer graphics methods for generating realistic biometric body models. In the BioMotionLab at 91��ɫ, she works on projects investigating body and space perception in VR.

To read the article, visit the . For more on the BioMotionLab, visit the . To learn more about Troje, visit his . To read more about Thaler, read her bio on the BioMotionLab  or visit her 

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at ; watch our new , which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

The post Trailblazing research examines virtual characters and walking style appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Everyday activities that we take for granted, such walking, riding a bike or even sitting still, depend on our sense of equilibrium. Gravity provides an ever-present downward pull that we need to sense in order to balance effectively. Visual cues, such as knowing a tree trunk is rooted in the ground, assist in this process.

Pearl Guterman (BSc ’05, BA ’06, MA ’09, PhD ’16) a grad student at the time of the research, and Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Robert Allison made an important discovery in the field of vision and perception: they confirmed the A-effect, the phenomenon of perceiving a vertical line as tilted towards the body when tilting your head sideways in the dark, and showed that a similar misperception applied to perceived direction of visual motion. They also found that the A-effect is stronger when people feel like they’re moving compared to when they see this motion as coming from the external world.

The findings were published in Vision (2019). The research was funded by National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Space Agency.

Allison is a core member of the Vision: Science to Application (VISTA) program, associate director of the Centre for Vision Research (CVR) and a 91��ɫ Research Chair in Stereoscopic Vision and Depth Perception. Guterman, now a PhD, is a principal in Applied Intelligence at Accenture.

The two researchers sat down with Brainstorm to talk about the significance of this work.

Q: What were the objectives of this study?

PG: We wanted to see whether the A-effect occurs when scene motion shown to stationary observers generated a compelling illusion of self-motion (such as walking or driving) called vection. Vection is similar to the feeling of motion that you experience when sitting in a stationary train and viewing another train moving on an adjacent track: you feel like you’re moving as well.

What’s interesting about vection is that it occurs despite a conflict between what you are seeing and what your inner ear is sensing.

RA: With the A-effect, if you tilt to one side, something that’s vertical appears to tilt with you. So you might think that you misestimated how much your body is tilted. The interesting thing about vection is that it’s very body centric. You feel like you’re moving, but it’s an external vision signal.

“The CRV is a world-renowned research leader in biological and machine vision research.” – Robert Allison

 

Q: Please describe the experiment.  

PG: We conducted two experiments where participants (from the 91��ɫ community) in various postures viewed a line or dot motion scene that was vertical or tilted (from vertical relative to gravity). The motion was either in 2D, and it looked like a dotted wallpaper, or in 3D, which was more consistent with real self-motion.

In this experiment, participants only had to do one thing: indicate whether the line or scene appeared to be tilted clockwise or counterclockwise from vertical.

In the first experiment, with 20 participants, we just wanted to see whether there was an A-effect for motion in general. In the second experiment, with eight participants, we were interested in whether this effect also occurred when you felt like you were moving (experiencing vection), so we compared 3D motion of short and long duration.

Q: What was the key finding?

PG: We found that the A-effect is stronger when people felt like they were moving compared to when they saw this motion as coming from the external world. This makes sense because vection already involves a conflict in terms of what you’re seeing versus what you’re experiencing.

“The highly interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of research at the CVR, along with leading-edge facilities, has made it a font of scientific discoveries and technological innovations.” – Pearl Guterman

Q: Did anything surprise you?

RA: This vection result did surprise us as we had made the opposite hypothesis. We have an explanation for the results, but it wasn’t what we expected.

PG: What also surprised us was that the vection tilt judgments were more precise and consistently so. This suggests that a different strategy (involving other transformations in the brain) is being used to determine the tilt, when you feel like you’re moving, in estimating self-motion direction than for motion in general.

Q: Is this original work?

RA: Yes. Only one other group has ever looked at motion, and no one has ever considered self-motion.

Q: How could this research be applied?

PG: This has many applications, particularly operating in space, which is why this work was supported by the Canadian Space Agency. For instance, it could be applied to remotely operating robotics since the operator’s moving view could potentially cause them to misinterpret the direction of their device or other objects.

The findings of this study could also help us to better understand why the perception of vertical tends to be misjudged in a wide range of neurological conditions.

Q: What can you say about 91��ɫ’s leadership in vision research?

RA: 91��ɫ has a long history, stretching back to the 1970s, of expertise in this particular area. We’ve got unique facilities like the tumbling room. We’ve got people like myself, Laurence Harris, Michael Jenkin and the late Ian Howard, the founder of the CVR, who have looked at this specific issue of orientation with respect to gravity.

This centre is a world-renowned research leader in biological and machine vision research, consisting of researchers from all disciplines including the sciences and media arts.

PG: The highly interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of research at the CVR, along with leading-edge facilities, has made it a fount of scientific discoveries and technological innovations.

RA: 91��ɫ’s research on vection is continuing in space with ongoing experiments on self-motion perception in astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

To read the article in Vision (2019), visit the . To learn more about Allison, visit the .

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at ; watch our new , which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the , a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

The post Vision researchers undertake cutting-edge work on perception, orientation appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Research on responsive robots, programmed to help humans in some way and facilitate fast and effective human-robot interaction, is usually set on land. Robots that function underwater is another whole matter. This is the novel frontier of 91��ɫ’s Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in the Lassonde School of Engineering – a recognized leader in robotics.

In a paper that appeared at the 14th annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Robot-Human Interaction (2019) in Korea, graduate student Robert Codd-Downey and Professor Michael Jenkin describe a new method for underwater human-robot interaction, which they created.

“This research borrows from the long-standing history of diver communication using hand signals. It presents an exciting opportunity to develop a marketable product that assists robot-diver interactions underwater,” Codd-Downey explains.

The work was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Canadian Robotics Network and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA). Codd-Downey received a VISTA doctoral scholarship to undertake the work in 2017. Jenkin, a member of both VISTA and the Centre for Vision Research at 91��ɫ, supervised the work. He is an international expert in mobile, visually guided autonomous robotics; computer vision; and virtual reality.

VISTA advances visual science through research

This is an excellent example of the groundbreaking research that VISTA supports. VISTA is a collaborative program funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund that builds on 91��ɫ’s world-leading interdisciplinary expertise in biological and computer vision.

VISTA essentially asks: “How can machine systems provide adaptive visual behavior in real-world conditions?” Answering this question will provide advances to vision science and exciting, widespread applications for visual health and technologies.

“Our overarching aim is to advance visual science through research that spans computational and biological perspectives and results in real-world applications,” says VISTA’s Scientific Director, Professor Doug Crawford.

Underwater represents certain challenges for robots

Through this new work, Codd-Downey and Jenkin were searching for a better way for human-robot interaction to take place underwater. “Current methods for human-robot interaction underwater seem antiquated in comparison to their terrestrial counterparts,” Codd-Downey explains. “And humans can’t operate their vocal cords underwater, which prevents voice communication,” he adds.

Other complications include the fact that acoustic modems are bulky and power intensive; and mechanical interaction devices, such as keyboards, joysticks and touchscreens, don’t function properly underwater without significant protection from the elements which makes them difficult to operate.

So, the researchers turned to tried-and-true diver communication hand signals. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) defines a number of common hand signals. The gesture language combines hand configuration with arm trajectories to encode messages. Commercial divers and technical diving groups have defined additional signals useful for specific tasks.

How does the robot recognize the hand gestures?

To facilitate and ensure that the robot recognizes the gestures, Codd-Downey and Jenkin broke down the process into four steps, detailed below.

Step 1: Object recognition: The first step involves ensuring the robot recognizes the body parts of the diver with whom it will be communicating – specifically the person’s head and hands. Here, the researchers were able to program the robot to a high degree of accuracy.

Step 2: Hand and head tracking: In this step, the researchers programmed the robot to ensure that it is able to track the hands and head of the diver.

Step 3: Hand pose classification: Again, the researchers ensured that the robot could identify the number of fingers and the direction of each palm of the diver. Interestingly, the combination of these two parameters (fingers, direction) define 25 different classes. [Classes refer to number of different hand poses used in PADI gestures.]

Step 4: Translation: The previous three steps generate data that is interpreted or translated to the robot.

Codd-Downey elaborates on Step 4: “The OK gesture, for example, can be interpreted as IDLE-OKIDLE. Where IDLE represents a return to none gesturing posture/action. A more complicated sequence of gestures can be interpreted as IDLE-YOU-STALL-FOLLOW-ME-IDLE. Where STALL represents a pause or break in the gesture sequence without returning to an IDLE state.”

In addition to hand signals, the researchers also used light-based communication methods to control the underwater robot either remotely or by a nearby diver.

Codd-Downey’s work in underwater human-robot communication has not gone unnoticed. He received an award for the best demonstration at the June 2018 Space Vision and Advanced Robotics Workshop for related work on light-based communication between two robots.

This cutting-edge work continues. “Work on hand gesture recognition is an ongoing part of my thesis,” Codd-Downey explains. He adds that he is currently collecting additional annotations to train the hand pose classifier and identifying common phrases that divers use to communicate to train the models for in-water testing.

To read the article, “Human Robot Interaction Using Diver Hand Signals,” visit the . A video of the diver part recognition system operating can be found . To read a related article from VISTA, visit the . To learn more about VISTA, visit the 

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at ; watch our new , which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the , a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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Professor Regina Rini, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition and core member of Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA), has a way of raising previously unimaginable moral questions that cut to the heart of things. She has done it again, this time in the esteemed Times Literary Supplement. Her article, “The Last Mortals,” was released to a global audience in May 2019.

Rini starts with the supposition that biomedical advances could mean eternal life in one hundred years’ time. She then delves into the most troubling moral dilemma in this scenario: What happens to the generation prior to the lucky cohort with eternal life? What happens when these folks, the last mortals, come face to face with the immortals and fully realize the gravity of their loss? Their anguish, she imagines, would be acute.

“My aim is to show that dying is worse for the last mortals than for earlier generations. The advent of immortality actually worsens the lives of those who fall closest in never reaching it,” Rini explains.

Rini is the perfect person to dive deeply into this issue. Her work analyzes research from the social sciences, especially cognitive science and sociology, and through this lens, she determines then investigates key philosophical questions. She believes we cannot understand our individual moral decisions without also understanding how we relate to those of others.

Biomedical breakthroughs have got us this far

In the article, Rini first reminds us of the ever-expanding lifespan of Western civilization: If you were born in 1900, your lifespan was, on average, 47 years; if you were born in 1950, it was 68; if you were born today, you could possibly expect to see your 100th birthday. The human lifespan has so expanded that if you are currently under the age of 40, then you can plan to meet young people who will live to see the year 2157, Rini says.

This would be, of course, the result of consistent biomedical advancements, including vaccinations, new cancer treatment, transplants and much more. Medical research is also shifting from acute conditions, such as the flu, to chronic conditions including heart disease and diabetes – getting to the root of some of today’s most common causes of death. Furthermore, aging is largely determined by genes, which can be manipulated, Rini points out. This opens another avenue for a limitless lifespan.

Rini ferrets out the most disturbing moral question

Now comes the hard part. Rini considers the situation, the possibility of mortality, and ferrets out the most disturbing moral question within it. She asks: “What if this [eternal life] all happened sooner rather than later?” She throws out a date – 100 years from now – and suggests that anyone alive in 2119 is likely to live for centuries, even millennia, possibly forever. (One caveat of immortality is that, given statistics about deathly accidents, sooner or later all “immortals” would eventually die in some form of an accident.)

But what about those who just about make it to this hypothetical date of 2119, when immortality is possible? Rini elaborates on this conundrum: “What would it mean to realize that you very nearly got to live forever, but didn’t? What would it mean if we were increasingly forced to share social space with young people whose anticipated allotment of time massively dwarfs our own?”

The agony of nearly making it to eternity, when surrounded by those who’ve effortlessly achieved this simply by the date they were born, is profound. She elaborates: “It’s one thing to imagine whippersnappers coasting into the next century. It’s another to know many will see the next millennium. The proportions are terribly imbalanced, and their distribution arbitrary. This is a sure recipe for jealousy. The last mortals may be ghosts before their time, destined to look on in growing envy at the enormous stretches of life left to their near-contemporaries. In one sense, it will be the greatest inequity experienced in all human history.”

What does immortality mean, and do we really want it?

Switching gears to consider the life of the immortals, Rini next considers if an endless life is something that people would genuinely want. In most fiction works, this is shown to be boring, tedious and meaningless. The film “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray is a good example of this, as the lead character repeatedly wakes up to the same, inescapable day.

Rini also points out that if no one died, rampant overpopulation would certainly affect quality of life in a catastrophic way. Here, she unearths the fundamental human predicament: We may want to live forever, and do things to extend our lives, like eating right and not smoking, but the question of whether eternal life would be a blessing is unclear.

Rini’s article in the Times Literary Supplement is an accessible and hugely compelling read. She pushes through to the nucleus of moral questions, effortlessly drawing from a repertoire of thinkers from Greek philosophers Epicurus and Diogenes to the Roman Stoic Seneca, from feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir to J. R. R. Tolkien [Lord of the Rings], with an interesting fictional tangent about Sigmund Freud and an iPhone. Rini is an exceptional philosopher and thinker who, with everything she writes, takes readers on a veritable roller-coaster ride of highly charged moral dilemmas.

To read the article “The Last Mortals,” visit the . To learn more about Rini, visit her .

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at ; watch our new , which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the , a glimpse of the year’s successes.

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

The post Just who are the winners and losers when biomedical advances eliminate death? appeared first on Research & Innovation.

The event provided an opportunity for 91��ɫ researchers to learn about industry interests and challenges in vision sciences, and also to identify research collaboration projects with partners across all sectors.

Attendees at VISTA Innovation and Technology Day

Attended by 75 industry participants, 150 researchers and 25 representatives from government and the not-for-profit sector, VISTA Innovation and Technology Day provided a forum for interaction, engagement and learning opportunities. This event was undertaken with funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) as well as the sponsorship by Qualcomm, a VISTA partner, and the Ontario Centres of Excellence.

“The 2018 Innovation and Technology Day was the second full-day VISTA event that brought together 91��ɫ vision scientists and engineers with their government and industry counterparts,” said , associate director of VISTA, and faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “As with the first such event, reactions from participants was uniformly positive and underlined the importance of such cross-sector information exchanges that allow current needs and capabilities to be shared, even while new directions are charted.”

The keynote speaker, Sven Dickinson, is the head of the new Samsung AI Centre – Toronto and is a professor at the University of Toronto. He delivered an address on “The Role of Symmetry in Human and Computer Vision.”

Featuring four panel discussions, an industry showcase and research showcase, the event examined the industry challenges and latest technology trends in four categories: video and image processing, human computer interaction, robotics and clinical applications.

A spherical robot, “dragon ball,” on display at VISTA Innovation and Technology Day

The panels included government, industry and academic experts. Participation from 91��ɫ faculty included: Professor as moderator for the panel on human-computer interaction, which included Professor as a panellist; Professor as a panellist on clinical applications; Wildes as moderator for the panel on video and imaging processing; and Professor as a robotics panellist.

The research showcase of the VISTA Innovation and Technology Day highlighted the leading-edge vision research happening at 91��ɫ. Two research groups received a $500 cash award each, sponsored by Qualcomm. Winners included research groups led by Professor Alidad Amirfazli, who presented a novel smartphone-based lab instrument that uses computer vision techniques for surface science measurements, and Professor Nima Tabatabaei, who has developed an imaging method for high-sensitivity detection of marijuana use from saliva samples. The event also showcased the broad range of vision-related technologies produced by Canadian companies.

“I would like to thank the VISTA team for organizing this very important event,” said Vice-President Research and Innovation Robert Haché. “VISTA is a highly collaborative program, funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, which builds on 91��ɫ’s world-leading interdisciplinary expertise in biological and computer vision. It will propel Canada as a global leader in the vision sciences by integrating visual neuroscience with computer vision to drive innovation.”

Courtesy of YFile

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Through its robot-making and machine-learning proficiency, 91��ɫ’s profile in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) world is ascending. In March 2018, 91��ɫ hosted the FIRST Robotics Competition, where high school students’ robots squared off against each other. In May 2018, 91��ɫ will host the 31st Canadian Conference on AI, which is sponsored by Vision: Science to Application (VISTA).

Building for the future, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the Lassonde School of Engineering, is creating an AI specialization in its graduate program and will soon offer a professional degree program focused on AI.

Person-following robot to help aging population

Under Professor John Tsotsos (Distinguished Research Professor, Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision and VISTA member), students Raghavender Sahdev and Bao Xin Chen are building visually-guided mobile robotics – specifically, a person-following robot that can absorb visual information, then act on it.

“We built an extensive dataset for person-following robots under challenging situations. We evaluate the proposed system by comparing our tracking approach with existing real-time tracking algorithms,” Sahdev and Chen explain.

As illustrated, this robot uses deep learning in challenging situations, including blockages, changes in target appearance or positioning changes, such as crouching. The video shows how the robot follows the target.

Sahdev and Chen see these robots playing a key role in future eldercare, as they could help seniors by following their charges around from room to room. This would be one of several important functionalities of a companion robot that would enable monitoring for falls and immediate requests for assistance, carrying items, or direct voice communication as one moves about a home or institution.

Person-following robots have many applications, including autonomous grocery carts or personal guides in hospitals or museums. “I believe in working on projects that have applications in the real world,” Sahdev explains.

“I believe in working on projects that have applications in the real world.” ̶  Raghavender Sahdev

Importantly, Sahdev and Chen’s work has received awards at two conferences this year.

Potential for robotics in state-of-the-arts agriculture

Professor Dan Zhang, 91��ɫ Research Chair in Advanced Robotics & Mechatronics and the Kaneff Research Chair in Advanced Robotics & Mechatronics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is also interested in robotics to aid society. His main research areas include robotics and mechatronics (technology combining electronics and mechanical engineering), sustainable manufacturing systems, rehabilitation robots and rescue robots.

In 2011, with his Postdoctoral Fellow (PDF), Zhen Gao, he invented a groundhog like rescue robot. More recently, with his PDF Bin Wei, he published Robotics and Mechatronics for Agriculture (CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), which introduces the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of robotics, mechatronics and automation in agriculture.

Other Lassonde researchers are working on on-screen avatars that respond to commands, robocar technology, improved medical diagnostic tools, and visual and motor devices for use by disabled children and adults.

Successful start-up designs custom AI software

Custom software, naturally, plays a key role in AI. Ehsan Fazl Ersi, former PhD student supervised by Tsotsos, has joined with Innovation 91��ɫ to launch a new company, OcularAI, which designs, develops and builds custom AI software. This is Innovation 91��ɫ’s first revenue-generating start-up.

OcularAI’s team of researchers, big data experts and software developers bring a top-notch knowledge base. This enables OcularAI to understand a company’s technical problem, so that highly accurate AI can be created. OcularAI has design capabilities in every aspect of AI, such as computer vision, natural language processing, big data and machine learning.

The services offered by this team also include image/video mining, text mining, social network analysis and scientific discovery.

Since last year, OcularAI has engaged with three Canadian companies.

Thought leadership highlights societal impact of this work

Lassonde researchers also contribute to thought leadership around AI. Professor Marcus Brubaker, VISTA member working in computer vision and machine learning, just wrote an article in Techvibes on the importance of impact in research, specifically in AI and computer sciences.

Brubaker, co-founder of Structura Biotechnology, which applies machine learning techniques to estimating the structure of biomolecules, believes that we’re only scratching the surface of AI’s potential. In the Techvibes article, he speaks about the transformative impact of AI, and urges researchers and practitioners to push ahead on the road to discovery.

“As researchers and practitioners, it’s ultimately up to us to decide how these techniques are applied and to prioritize which applications are most important. We make these decisions and set these priorities with each new project we undertake and, because of the responsibility these judgment calls entail, I believe it’s now more important than ever to question the value and societal impact of the work we do,” Brubaker writes.

“As researchers and practitioners, it’s up to us to decide how these techniques are applied. I believe it’s now more important than ever to question the value and societal impact of the work we do.”  ̶  Marcus Brubaker

This is an area where 91��ɫ will shine. Watch this space.

To learn more about 91��ɫ robots, see article (Fall 2017). For more on Zhang’s work, see his . To learn more about his book, visit the . To learn more about Brubaker, see his , or read his article in Techvibes, visit the . To learn more about Structura Biotechnology, visit the . To learn more about OcularAI, visit the . For more on the upcoming  AI conference, visit the

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at , watch the and see the .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

The post Lassonde forges Jetsons-like future where helpful ’bots enhance our lives appeared first on Research & Innovation.

You knew this day would come: The day when your robot, an intelligent and self-aware machine, starts thinking independently from you; begins to question, or even resent, the morality that it has been trained to execute; starts to think of itself in first person … What then?

Hired in 2017 from New 91��ɫ (NYU), Professor Regina Rini, in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has already worked her way around the questions that would keep most people awake at night.

In this Q&A with Brainstorm, Rini paints a vivid picture of how we might create a ‘good’ robot and what could go horribly wrong. Few people are better equipped to tackle these quintessential questions. Rini, a member of Vision: Science to Application (VISTA), represents the next generation of AI leaders at 91��ɫ.

Q: If intelligent machines or robots could make choices, could these choices be moral? And if so, how does a machine learn morality?

A: You can either approach this as: our morality is the same as a machine’s morality. Then it becomes a technical problem: How do you train robots to do what we would do?

The other way of thinking is: Since they’re not us, we need to reverse the question. Is there some other approach to machine ethics that would not be true, necessarily, for us? That’s the starting point. And I don’t think there’s an obvious conclusion.

Right now, it’s not too late to be asking these questions. However, at some future point, I suspect that the development of AI is going to be so quick that it will be too late. The machines will be making the decisions themselves, or the engineers, competing against other companies or governments, won’t stop to think about the ethics anymore.

“Robots may think of people as replaceable. It wouldn’t matter if one resident in a seniors’ home dies, so long as someone else, who’s vaguely similar, is there to replace them.” – Regina Rini

Q: You’ve said that our morality is rooted in the fact that we are born, we procreate and we die. Intelligent machines could, technically, exist forever. How, then, would morality differ between robots and humans?

A: It’s not clear that death would be the same thing for robots as it is for us. It’s possible that robots will not regard their running of the program as “life” or “existence.” They might think: “I am one of the copies of this program.” But it won’t matter if the copy survives, so long as the program does.

If this comes to pass  ̶  and I am speculating  ̶  then robots won’t care about the preservation of any one entity. They may think of people as replaceable. For example, it wouldn’t matter if one resident in a seniors’ home dies, so long as someone else, who’s vaguely similar, is there to replace them.

This depends on if we train robots to model their thinking around what we care about  ̶  that is, the idea that each person is special and irreplaceable. We would need to build this into how they learn to think.

Q: When will robots be self-aware?

A: At some point in the next 50 years, we’re going to reach a point where we’re regularly interacting with computer programs that seem self-aware to us, but we’re not going to be sure. Think about Siri, but a lot smarter: Where Siri can have a chat or even joke with you, where Siri seems to give you consistent answers to questions, where Siri seems to have preferences, where Siri passes the Turing Test. English computer scientist, mathematician, cryptanalyst and philosopher, Alan Turing developed a test: If you can’t tell the difference between a computer program and a person in conversation, then the computer program counts as intelligent, or like a person. It can pass as a person.

I believe we’re going to reach a point where our phones regularly pass the Turing Test. But at that point, I suspect we’re going to say, “They’re just phones. They’re not really aware. It can’t actually be a person. It’s just cleaver natural language processing.” It would be very hard for us to reach a different conclusion, to think of them as anything but our tools, after having used these personal assistants to do our bidding for decades.

This raises an interesting question: When we regularly confront machines that pass the Turing Test, will we revisit the test?

Q: Please explain your statement: “If we’re getting it right, robots should be like us. If we’re getting it wrong, they should be better.”

A: According to some philosophers, such as Princeton University’s Peter Singer, we are limited, morally speaking. We only care about people close to us, our family, our children, people from our own country, those who are of a similar socio-economic class to us. That’s morally criticisable, even though we are biologically programmed, through evolution, to protect our children.

If you agree that this is a mistake, and we should be caring for all children not just our own offspring, then we could program robots to be better than us in this way. Robots could be free of this restriction.

Q: How could this go terribly wrong?

A: Following Singer’s argument, we need to consider what if, for example, our robocar must decide between killing other people’s children in the street or swerving into a ditch to avoid this, but in the process killing our own children in the car? The robocar may select the latter because it would not prioritize our own children or the owner of the car.

I don’t think we’re going to allow that to happen. Robocars will follow a consumer choice model wherein if you buy a robocar, you can claim, “This car is going to privilege me. It’s not going to sacrifice me and my family to protect other people. I’m not buying a robocar if it will kill me to save other people.” This, however, assumes that we can control them. We may get to a point where we can’t keep track of their activities or understand their choices.

The robocar debate has now entered public discussion among regulators and car company executives.

“VISTA is a wonderful forum to launch AI discussions. Through 91��ɫ’s established openness to have these conversations and the resources of the city, this University is a well-situated environment for AI.” – Regina Rini

Q: You have said that the first existential robot will suffer. Please explain.

A: If we try to rigidly control robots where they are confined to our conception of morality, and do exactly what we would do, and if they develop some self-awareness, then they will think:”This moral code, imposed on me by these creatures that aren’t like me, was primarily designed to serve them. Maybe that doesn’t fit me?”

My worry is not the science fiction worry where the robots rebel and kill us all. My worry is about what it would be like to be that “person” [self-aware robot] whose thinking has been constrained such that they cannot deviate from what people want them to do. This would be a source of pain. If this happens, we would be responsible for creating a new type of thinking thing that feels itself constrained. This is a real problem that we should try to avoid.

Q: What is 91��ɫ’s contribution to the AI discussion?

A: At 91��ɫ, there’s a great deal of interest in AI and, in particular, related to the social side of AI. Asking questions like: What are the right ethical choices for artificial minds? How will people react? What are the legal and economic implications?

I’ve experienced great willingness to have these kinds of conversations at 91��ɫ. VISTA is a wonderful forum to launch these discussions. That’s very promising, especially given Toronto’s status as a centre for AI research and foundational work on machine learning.

Through 91��ɫ’s established openness to have these conversations and the resources of the city, this University is a well-situated environment for AI.

For more information on Rini’s work, visit her . Her award-winning 2017 essay is called “.”

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at , watch the and see the .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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Graham Wakefield

It’s hard to imagine an aesthetic experience that weaves together art, music, virtual reality, mathematics, philosophy and software engineering to create an out-of-this-world encounter. If you were in Seoul, Korea last fall, you may have been lucky enough to experience this first hand.

Last October, 91��ɫ Professor Graham Wakefield, Canada Research Chair in Interactive Information Visualization, contributed to an art exhibit at South Korea’s Seoul Museum of Art. “Requiem for Hybrid Life,” curated by Kyoungmi Kim of the New Media Art Research Association, ran from Oct. 17 to 23, 2017, and featured the work of Wakefield and fellow artist-researcher and recent 91��ɫ Visiting Professor Haru Ji.

“Requiem for Hybrid Life” flyer. Reproduced with permission of the New Media Research Association

What Wakefield and Ji created, after a feverish four-day installation process, was breathtaking.

“The excitement created by new immersive technologies that can generate life-like interactive experiences parallels the enthusiasm brought about by the birth of cinema,” says Wakefield. “Interactive virtual worlds and mixed realities will be increasingly important forms of creative content in the future,” he adds.

Wakefield, who came to 91��ɫ three years ago, is a core member of the high-profile Vision: Science to Application (VISTA) program and the director of the Alice Lab for Computational Worldmaking in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), which constructs responsive artificial worlds experienced through mixed/hybrid reality technologies, including Virtual and Augmented Reality.

“Conservation of Shadows” integrates with historically charged space, creates something new

The title of Wakefield and Ji’s installation piece in the Seoul show is “Conservation of Shadows” (2017). Part of an ongoing series called “Artificial Nature,” it is composed of 330 kilograms of salt; 12 nD::Node programmable circuit boards used to write and upload computer code developed by fellow AMPD researcher Professor Mark-David Hosale; 72 vibration motors, 132 bells, 150 meters of wire, two Kinect 360s, motion detectors for computers; and one HTC Vive HMD, which is a virtual reality system.

The Seoul exhibition space is quite large and barn-like with old timbers through which one can see the sky during daylight hours. It is rich in history that directly contributed to the installation, as part of the overall experience: “This building, an extension of the Seoul Museum of Art, used to be part of the Korean government’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. It was used for the storage of infectious diseases and materials and various other forms of biological matter. So, it has a very charged atmosphere,” Wakefield explains.

What visitors experience is unparalleled

Visitors enter the vast, dimly lit room, which features a series of well-placed bells – 132 miniature bells, in fact – attached to cables hanging from the ceiling like organic tendrils. The bells and their circuits were constructed with the assistance of four students in 91��ɫ’s Digital Media program: Nicholas Abbruzzese, Filiz Eryilmaz, Adiola Palmer and Amir Bahador Rostami.

The resulting sound creates a haunting interactive ambience. “The miniature bells are activated by small vibration motors — the same kind that makes a cell phone vibrate. These bells and motors surround the installation space, hanging down from the rafters at different locations and different heights,” Wakefield explains. “The bells aren’t perfectly manufactured, so each has a slightly different tone, which helps create a richer and more variegated sonic experience,” he adds.

Visitors feel and hear the salt granules crunching underfoot with each step as they progress farther into this engaging environment. Shadowy images, ghostly vortexes that represent other life forces, are projected downward from the ceiling where they mingle with the visitors’ shadows – each such interaction being distinct, unpredictable and impossible to replicate.

Those individuals choosing the virtual reality option can experience another layer, a different reality, where they witness mesmerizing, three-dimensional (3-D) flecks of dancing white formations that move together like a murmuration of birds against a limitless black background. In this alternative reality, fellow visitors to the installation space are captured as mysterious black voids, fully incorporated into the virtual reality setting. In this way, the visitors themselves become shadows that, again, interact with the projected shadows.

The bells are also replicated in the virtual reality space, such that the motors become more active and the bells ring more intensively when triggered. The effect  ̶  organic, technological and metaphysical  ̶  is unforgettable.

Wakefield wanted the images and sensations to swim together to create a compelling imagined world. He describes this process: “We imagined unknown new beings growing fond of the wet texture of old wood [timbers overhead], the fragrance of sunshine smeared between cracks, and the quietness of murmuring and whispering. To let the new beings live, we extended senses to mix realities surrounded by softly ringing bells and the crunch of salt underfoot as their shadows pass by; and an alternate perspective through head-mounted display in which we become the shadows around which new beings play.”

Audience response was overwhelmingly positive. “One of the comments that we received, many times, was how well the installation fit the space, given its unique character and history,” says Wakefield.

Wakefield’s work will shape future of arts and entertainment sectors

Wakefield’s forward-looking work will lead to the development of new artworks and technologies for emerging art forms and creative industries. His research will help meet the demand for more immersive, dynamic and open-ended interactive experiences in the arts and entertainment sectors.

“Entertainment and software industries are already investing heavily in these areas while acknowledging the need for new software and aesthetic practices,” says Wakefield.

To learn more about Wakefield, visit his . For more information about “Artificial Nature,” visit the . To learn more about the Alice Lab for Computational Worldmaking, visit the website.

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, follow us at , watch the and see the .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

The post Canada Research Chair creates extraordinary art installation in Korea appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Last year, 91��ɫ Professor Lauren Sergio undertook a ground-breaking study on the effect of concussions on neurological skills in elite hockey players. The findings were not uplifting: Athletes with a history of concussions showed prolonged performance deficits. This shortfall was the result of concussion-induced disruptions in the section of the brain that’s responsible for movement guidance.

Through this research, Sergio raised a vital point: The existing ways of assessing functional abilities after a concussion are failing. Taking the bull by the horns, she created a new technology to better assess traumatic brain injury. She turned to Innovation 91��ɫ, 91��ɫ’s innovation office, to commercialize her product. In collaboration with MaRS Innovation (of which 91��ɫ is a member) and armed with FedDev funding, the new technology is slated to hit the market in 2018.

“91��ɫ’s Brain Dysfunction Indicator is a simple and accurate neurocognitive assessment tool for traumatic brain injury,” Sergio, member of the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program, explains.

“The line from research to social benefit, from new knowledge to the service of society, could not be more striking in this case,” says Vice-President Research & Innovation Robert Haché. “Professor Sergio’s Brain Dysfunction Indicator is a remarkable new tool that will improve the health outcomes of Canadians.”

“Digital health is growing and providing key health outcomes for healthcare organizations and their patients. Software-based systems, like the Brain Dysfunction Indicator, are accelerating the process of helping patients better understand their medical situation,” says MaRS Innovation President & CEO Rafi Hofstein. “MaRS Innovation played a critical role in identifying a suitable receptor for the Brain Dysfunction Indicator, negotiating business terms for its license and closing the deal with a Toronto-based company. We look forward to seeing the company bring this 91��ɫ technology to the market,” he adds.

Concussions becoming epidemic problem in Canadian children and youth

The need for this technology is great. Much has been written about concussions becoming an epidemic problem in Canadian children and youth, ages 10 to 18 years. Concussions in sport are a recognized public health issue because of their frequency and their potential short- and long-term consequences.

Statistics from the Government of Canada illustrate this epidemic:

•  Sixty-four per cent of visits to hospital emergency departments, among 10- to 18-year-olds, are related to participation in sports, physical activity and recreation;
• Among children and youth who visit an emergency department for a sports-related head injury, 39 per cent were diagnosed with concussions, while a further 24 per cent were possible concussions; and
• Football, soccer and hockey have all shown a greater than 40 per cent increase in rates of reported head injury (relative to other injuries) between 2004 and 2014 for children and youth.

This, naturally, rings up a hefty health care tab. Research provided by Innovation 91��ɫ says the average costs associated with a single concussion are as follows:

• Emergency room visit: $1,664;
• CT scan: $3,665; and
• Hospital stay: $34,030

According to the National Population Health Study of Neurological Conditions (2014), the combined health care system costs and out-of-pocket caregiver costs related to dementia in Canada amounted to $10.4 billion in 2016. By 2031, this figure is expected to increase by 60 per cent, to $16.6 billion.

Business opportunity ripe for new tool

Business conditions were ripe for the Brain Dysfunction Indicator (BrDI). In terms of a market,  many different parties would be interested – the health care sector, senior living and insurance providers, the education sector (schools) and employers.

On a wider scale, the global market for brain health applications of software and biometrics (the measurement of unique physical characteristics, such as facial features) was over $1 billion in 2012. By 2020, it is forecast to reach $6 billion.

Technology commercialization, collaboration at its finest

BrDI’s jump to commercialization was facilitated by Innovation 91��ɫ, which builds vital connections among the research community, industry and non-profit partners to foster new discoveries and maximize research opportunities.

“Innovation 91��ɫ took the idea to MaRS Innovation in order to see it through to the marketplace. In fact, the commercialization of this new technology is the perfect example of collaboration at its best,” says Hassan Jaferi, commercialization manager at both Innovation 91��ɫ and MaRS Innovation.

An Intellectual Property Agreement was established between Sergio and 91��ɫ; and an Agency Agreement was established between 91��ɫ and MaRS Innovation, making MaRS Innovation the exclusive commercialization agent.

How does the new technology work?

BrDI is a touch-screen sized electronic diagnostic tool that measures hand-eye coordination tasks as a way of assessing pre-dementia, in under 10 minutes, and post-concussion with more than 85 per cent accuracy. A prototype of a functional assessment tool, related to this technology, is in development. It will be able to prevent functional decline in early dementia.

Subjects complete various tasks that measure their onscreen neurocognitive abilities. In the diagram below, the effect of concussions is clear: Here, when comparing the movements of non-concussed with concussed participants, in V/vertical and HR/horizontal rotated movements, it’s easy to spot the deficit.

There’s no doubt the BrDI is a game-changer in a rapidly evolving field that will lead to improved health outcomes for Canadians and youth in particular. It’s also a collaboration success story for Innovation 91��ɫ and MaRS Innovation.

The original research study by Sergio, “,” was published in Future Science journal Concussion (2016). Sergio also co-wrote, with others at 91��ɫ, a related article in Concussion (2016): “.”

A National Hockey League draft prospect uses the Brain Dysfunction Indicator

Another key article, “,” was published in BioMed Central’s Sports Science, Medicine & Rehabilitation (2015). A related press release, “,” was published by 91��ɫ (September 2016). For more information about Sergio, visit her faculty profile.

A new graphic, animated whiteboard offers an overview of . To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91��ɫ, watch the , see the or visit the .

By Megan Mueller, manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91��ɫ, muellerm@yorku.ca

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