Graduate Students

Back to School 2024

St. George

Trinity College

�r�� Mississauga

�r�� Scarborough

Undergraduate Students

University College

The �r��’s three campuses are abuzz with excitement as students from the Toronto region, across Canada and around the world kicked off a new school year.

The fall 2024 semester marked the first time that students on the St. George campus, �r�� Scarborough and �r�� Mississauga had their first day of classes on the same day, Sept. 3 – part of an effort to align key academic dates across the university.

AskMe Anything volunteers were also out in full force to offer tips and guidance, especially to the thousands of first-year students navigating the first day of their post-secondary education.

�r�� President Meric Gertler welcomed new and returning students, as well as faculty, staff and librarians, in a video message released last week.

“[�r��] is an exciting place to be, and this is an exciting time to be a part of it,” he said.

Photographers were on hand across all three campuses in recent days to capture the sights – and energy – of a new academic year:

(photo by Johnny Guatto)

Welcome signs wrap �r��’s main gates on the St. George campus as students make their way to and from classes on the first day of a new school year.

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

The weeks leading up to the first day of school featured plenty of enthusiasm as students and their families carted belongings into residences at �r�� Mississauga.

(photo by Polina Teif)

At St. George, volunteers and residence staff were on hand to provide a warm welcome, refreshments and help hoisting bins and boxes.

(photo by Polina Teif)

“I was nervous at first, but everyone’s been so welcoming,” said University College student Cassidy Smith, who posed for an Aug. 25 photo with her mother as she moved into her dorm.

“There’s such a good energy around the place and I can feel that this is going to be like a second home to me."

(photo by Terrence Tong)

At �r�� Scarborough, luggage carts – and several volunteers – helped ferry students’ belongings between the parking lot and residence buildings.

(photo by Polina Teif)

Gabriella Baichwal, who was born in Toronto and grew up in Chicago, joked that she “brought way too much stuff” to fill up her single room in Trinity College on the St. George campus.

“I brought all my clothes, a mini-fridge and all of this stuff, and I feel like a spoiled brat. But that’s OK – you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do,” said Baichwal, as her parents helped unload items from their vehicle’s roof.

Her father, Ravi Baichwal, whose own father went to grad school at �r�� in the 1960s after moving from India, said he was “incredibly proud” of his daughter for following in her grandfather’s footsteps.

“I have that incredible pit of anxiety and hope all mixed up into one,” he said.

(photo by Polina Teif)

There were plenty of opportunities for students to meet new friends, showcase their school spirit and learn about extra-curricular opportunities at the tri-campus cheer-off event and clubs carnival held on the St. George campus ahead of the Labour Day long weekend.

(photo by Polina Teif)

More than 300 �r�� clubs were present at the clubs carnival, an annual event organized by the �r�� Students' Union. There is also a Student Groups Fair on Sept. 5 and 6 at �r�� Mississauga, and a UTSC Clubs Fair at �r�� Scarborough on Sept. 23.

(photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Orientation programs at �r�� Mississauga included a painting activity that invited students to harness their creativity.

(photo by Terrence Tong)

It was all smiles at �r�� Scarborough as students, friends and family settled in for the fall term.

PhD researcher draws on refugee experience to study plight of asylum-seekers in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:08:31 +0000

PhD researcher draws on refugee experience to study plight of asylum-seekers in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/14/2024 - 12:08

Cutline

Jona Zyfi, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, is using a human rights lens to explore the links between technology and migration (supplied image)

Cynthia Macdonald

Topic

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Global

Subheadline

"We’re using criminal justice mechanisms to deal with what should be an administrative process"

Jona Zyfi’s life has so far been an “adventurous story” full of fear, hope, resilience and relief.

At age seven, Zyfi was smuggled into Australia under a false name as a child refugee claimant. At 16, after a forced return to her native Albania, she emigrated to Canada carrying only a suitcase and teddy bear.

Now a PhD candidate at the �r��’s Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, Zyfi is examining how public policy shapes the plight of asylum seekers and migrants in Canada. Her work is shedding valuable light on some of the little-known – and sometimes shocking – injustices faced by refugee claimants in a country widely thought to be among the most welcoming and multicultural in the world.

“The work that I do is very much informed by my lived experiences,” she says. “It’s where I find the strength to do it.”

Why is Zyfi examining the refugee experience through the lens of criminology and not political science?

“Lots of people have asked me that,” she says. “Even I had moments when I’d wonder, ‘Am I in the right department?’ But the deeper I go into my research, the more confirmation I get that I am doing the right thing.”

This is due to the phenomenon of “crimmigration,” a term that’s used to describe how refugee claimants are often subjected to processes normally associated with the criminal justice system.

“Immigration is an administrative field, while the criminal justice system is a lot more heavy-handed,” Zyfi explains. “And yet, we’re using criminal justice mechanisms to deal with what should be an administrative process. That doesn’t make sense.”

In some ways, she says, Canada’s approach to refugees is a good news story.

In the last decade, for example, the country has welcomed more than 40,000 Syrian refugees, and has been in the vanguard of acceptance for those fleeing persecution on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.

But there is darker side, too. Many Canadians are unaware that children can be held in detention with or without their parents and that adult asylum seekers who can’t be accommodated in holding centres have been detained in provincial jails alongside those serving criminal sentences.

Canada is also one of the few countries in the Global North where there is no legal limit on detention, meaning that claimants can spend years in jails or holding centres before their cases are heard.

“They rarely get access to legal aid and many of them can’t speak the language,” Zyfi says. “So they don’t even understand what’s happening. They’re unaware of their rights and terrified of being deported.”

Zyfi says she is particularly interested in the role technology plays in immigration and asylum processes and application assessment procedures. In an effort to reduce dependence on migrant detention, some asylum seekers are now granted temporary freedom but monitored in ways that are highly controversial.

These methods include the use of electronic ankle monitors as well as voice reporting via cellphone – both of which can fail if batteries or cell reception run out. Facial recognition software is also gaining in popularity.

But even a small technical mistake, Zyfi argues, can place a claimant’s life in danger. “There’s this idea that technology is going to solve all our problems,” says Zyfi. “It’s going to make faster decisions, better decisions. The decisions are faster, but that doesn’t always mean that they are better.”

Zyfi’s concern about the rights of asylum seekers is born from her own experiences.

Born shortly after the fall of communism in Albania, her early life was spent amid the anarchy and civil insurrection that followed the collapse of the country’s economy. “We had to hide under the tables, because bullets could fly through at any minute,” she recalls. “One flew through our balcony window. The arms depots were open; anybody could get bullets, a grocery bag full of grenades, whatever they could find. It was a free-for-all.”

Using a false name, Zyfi made her way to Australia with her mother and sister via a human smuggling network. But the family was expelled from Australia in 2005 when Albania was deemed to be a safe country of origin. “I remember my mother packing up our entire life in a shipping container,” she says.

Four years later, Zyfi came to Canada and two years ago, after a lengthy series of applications and various immigration statuses, she was finally granted citizenship.

Now, she is firmly committed to making life better for other migrants and refugees, including by giving them a bigger say in decisions that affect them. In policymaking, “our stories are not being incorporated in a meaningful way,” she says. “To me, that is the saddest part.”

The groundswell of private support for Syrian refugees – Zyfi herself was an enthusiastic sponsor – shows that caring for survivors of global crisis is a Canadian value. But she says that civil society alone cannot provide the support needed, and the government can do more – not only for immigrants deemed to be economically desirable, but for those whose lives are in jeopardy.

“Historically, immigration has been key to the Canadian economy. It has also been a fundamental tenet of nation-building and multiculturalism,” Zyfi says. “But we are doing the bare minimum. We have the capacity to do so much more.”

�r�� urban studies course explores wildfire response in Canada's North

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:57:57 +0000

�r�� urban studies course explores wildfire response in Canada's North

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 08/12/2024 - 15:57

Cutline

Clouds of smoke billow into the air as forest fires burn in the Northwest Territories in 2015, leaving trees damaged and charred (photo by Sherry Galey via Getty Images)

Cynthia Macdonald

Topic

School of Cities

Geography and Planning

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture

Innis College

Subheadline

As part of a graduate seminar, students and professors visited Yellowknife to study the city's 2023 wildfire evacuation with an eye to informing future policy recommendations

Wildfires such as the one that devastated Jasper, Alta., in July are becoming ever more common in Canada due to increased record-high temperatures and drought conditions associated with climate change.

One year ago, it was Yellowknife that found itself under threat, forcing a near-complete evacuation of its 20,000 residents. Unlike Jasper, Yellowknife's homes and businesses were ultimately saved from destruction, but the Northwest Territories capital is nevertheless reviewing its wildfire response plans so it will be better prepared in the future.

And the city is receiving valuable assistance from the �r��.

Professors and graduate students from the urban studies program at Innis College recently visited the city to research disaster response policies and make suggestions on possible improvements.

“We ended up designing a course that provided a retrospective on the evacuation experience as it related to government officials and the non-profit sector,” says David Roberts, an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of geography and planning in the Faculty of Arts & Science and director of the urban studies program.

“The students are now working on projects that will provide policy recommendations for the future.”

The view over Yellowknife’s Old Town (supplied image)

This seminar, which was also taught by Assistant Professor Aditi Mehta, is one of several Multidisciplinary Urban Graduate Seminars (MUGS) being offered by �r��’s School of Cities.

Roberts and Mehta created the class in consultation with Rebecca Alty, Yellowknife’s mayor and a visiting expert, or Canadian Urban Leader, at the School of Cities.

Mehta says that the seminar’s multidisciplinary nature was key to crafting a well-rounded response to the crisis.

“We were very deliberate in picking students from different disciplines so that we could create knowledge and think about what happened from different perspectives,” she says, adding that students who successfully applied came from backgrounds including geography and planning, forestry, anthropology, landscape architecture and public health.

The seminar’s participants pose for a group photo at the Bush Pilot’s Monument in Yellowknife (supplied image)

The 10 graduate students visited sites and interviewed government officials, community organizations, residents and Indigenous leaders. They explored how to build improved communication infrastructure in the city and investigated the connections between a local housing crisis and climate change.

They also studied how Indigenous Peoples, including members of the Dene Nation living in Yellowknife, suffer disproportionate harms due to wildfire. Research shows that while 12 per cent of the entire Canadian population is at risk, that number rises to 32 per cent for on-reserve First Nations communities.

Léo Jourdan, who is completing his master of science degree in forestry at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, says the seminar provided him with an opportunity to examine wildfire science from a different angle.

“The research we do in our lab has to do with wildfires, but from a scientific point of view – in the sense that we try to answer ecological questions about the origins of these fires. So this class was a great opportunity to broaden my perspective and learn more about the human side of wildfires, and I think it did an amazing job.”

Jourdan explains that most wildfires are a natural – and necessary – phenomenon. “A lot of the forest in Canada co-evolved with fires, and their ecosystems would not function without them,” he says. “The issue we’re facing now, however, is that the wildfires are getting more intense and the communities closer.”

The seminar group enjoyed the city’s culinary and cultural offerings (supplied image)

For Lilian Dart, the course offered an opportunity to explore her twin interests in environmental justice and housing policy.

“One of the focuses was to look at how people experiencing homelessness were evacuated,” says Dart, a PhD student in the department of geography and planning.

She notes that in the wake of the wildfire evacuation, a team from professional services firm KPMG conducted an audit that revealed significant holes in the system that allowed vulnerable populations to fall through.

“People without housing, for example, did not have social safety supports that other people did,“ she says. “They also had comorbidities that affected their health, making them even more vulnerable.”

Dart’s final assignment for the course is a policy paper that examines this issue. “My recommendations are mostly to do with how the municipality can better support service organizations in their collaboration with one another. How can resources be co-ordinated? And how can people work together to ensure a more organized response?”

Jourdan, for his part, is proposing that Yellowknife adopt the principles of FireSmart, a national program that leads the development of programs and resources to help Canadians increase their resilience to wildfires.

Mehta says Yellowknife’s mayor provided the group from �r�� with some recommendations of her own. “She gave an important critique of planning education in our country, noting that people rarely study the problems that cities in northern Canada are facing,” Mehta says. “Instead, we are overly focused on big cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.”

Roberts says that the policy recommendations written by Dart, Jourdan and the other students will be offered “not just to the mayor, but to everyone else we talked to – those working in the non-profit field and at the territorial level, as well as those who work with the Dene.

“We’re now thinking about other ways of presenting this information, such as returning to Yellowknife to ensure that the dialogue we’ve started is able to continue.”

�r�� team takes top spot in self-driving car challenge for 6th time in 7 years

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:42:55 +0000

�r�� team takes top spot in self-driving car challenge for 6th time in 7 years

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 08/07/2024 - 13:42

Cutline

As part of the competition, the �r�� team’s autonomous vehicle had to react to obstacles such as a fake deer moving across the road (photo courtesy of aUToronto)

Safa Jinje

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Alumni

Artificial Intelligence

Self-Driving Cars

Undergraduate Students

UTIAS

Subheadline

"Each time we saw an obstacle – a stop sign, a red light, the railroad bar coming down – and the car reacted by stopping and then continuing, we let out a big cheer or a sigh of relief"

A team from the �r�� has placed first for sixth time in seven years in a North American self-driving car competition.

After finishing in second place last year, the aUToronto team returned to the top spot at the 2024 SAE AutoDrive Challenge II, which was held in June at the Mcity Test Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The aUToronto team competed against nine other teams from across Canada and the United States.

“Through the AutoDrive Challenge, we are preparing the next generation of engineers to head into the industry, to keep pushing towards the challenging goal of reaching Level 4 autonomous driving,” says Tim Barfoot, a professor at the �r�� Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and one of the team’s academic advisers.

“The team did another excellent job this year.”

The team approached the competition by going back to first principles to ensure they had a reliable and robust system, says Kelvin Cui, a �r�� Engineering alumnus and the team’s principal.

He joined aUToronto last fall after five years with the �r�� Formula Racing team, where he founded the “driverless” division.

“We looked at what was going to get us the most points at competition and made sure that we were not overbuilding our system and adding too much complexity,” he says.

This meant pushing for additional testing time at UTIAS and achieving more than 900 kilometres of system testing prior to the competition.

The team placed first out of 10 teams from institutions across the United States and Canada (photo courtesy of aUToronto)

A partnership with the AutoDrive team from Queen’s University was instrumental to aUToronto’s preparation. The aUToronto team drove Artemis, their autonomous vehicle, to Kingston, Ont. to assess the system at Queen’s testing facility, which features intersections and electronic streetlights.

“We added radar to our vehicle as a new sensor, so we needed to be aware of all the sensor failure modes,” says third-year Engineering Science student Robert Ren.

“A lot of our testing time went into making sure that including radar didn’t break anything else in our system, and that it could handle any sensor failure cases.”

Including radar sensors in the vehicle’s perception system allowed it to measure the motion of objects directly, which is not possible with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. 

“Radar can help with adverse weather object detections,” adds Ren. “So, if the vehicle is operating under heavy rain or fog, the LiDAR is going to be limited, but the radio waves from radar can help the vehicle see what objects are in front and what objects are moving. This enables it to make good decisions when driving in uncertain scenarios.” 

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A post shared by aUToronto (@autoronto_uoft)

In an event where both LiDAR and radar sensors fail, the aUToronto system can still rely on visual cameras to perform object tracking. This made the team’s object tracker much more robust compared to last year when the team experienced sensor failure during a dynamic event.

Brian Cheong, a �r�� Engineering master’s student who has been a member of aUToronto since 2021, acted as technical director of the autonomy team this year – part of a new leadership structure introduced by Cui.  

“In the past, it was a lot of work for our team’s principal to keep track of all the systems,” Cheong says. “So instead of having to work directly with all 15 sub teams, Kelvin created groups of sub teams that we called stacks, and each stack had a director.”

The restructuring and technical innovations paid off, with aUToronto completing its first clean sweep in the AutoDrive Challenge II, placing first in all static and dynamic events, including the concept design presentation and intersection challenge.

“The intersection challenge was a big highlight for us,” says Cheong. “Kelvin and Robert were in the car, and I was on the sidelines watching with the rest of the team. Each time we saw an obstacle – a stop sign, a red light, the railroad bar coming down – and the car reacted by stopping and then continuing, we let out a big cheer or a sigh of relief.

“And then we were all silent as the car approached the final obstacle, which was a deer. We watched as Artemis slowed down to a stop and the deer moved by. Then we screamed and cheered, and we could hear cheering from inside the car.”

“Our success is entirely a team effort,” adds Cui. “It was not smooth sailing before the competition. The only reason we won is because everybody put in so much effort to test our vehicle every day.

“That’s how we were able to get this reliable system across the line.” 

More with less: Researchers map a more sustainable path to home construction in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:16:30 +0000

More with less: Researchers map a more sustainable path to home construction in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 07/31/2024 - 14:16

Cutline

(photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Cities

Sustainability

Subheadline

From more multi-unit projects to fewer basements, a computer simulation shows that multiple building strategies will be necessary to address the country's housing affordability while meeting climate targets

Adopting the right mix of sustainable construction practices could allow Canada to meet its housing goals – as many as 5.8 million new homes by 2030 – without blowing past its climate commitments.

Researchers in the �r��’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment (CSBE) developed a computer simulation that forecasts the emissions associated with new housing and infrastructure construction.

The work builds on previous CSBE research that showed that, in order for Canada to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets, homes built in 2030 will need to produce 83 per cent fewer greenhouse gases during construction than those built in 2018.

“There is an obvious tension between our commitment to reducing our emissions and the need to restore housing affordability,” says Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor of civil and mineral engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering who is the CSBE’s director.

“But that tension only exists because of our status quo approaches to housing. As our research shows, we can build 5.8 million homes and cut GHG emissions from construction – it’s just that we must build them differently than we have in the past.”

In their latest paper, the CSBE team built what they call the future infrastructure growth (FIG) model, which enabled the team to evaluate the effect of implementing various strategies that aim to lower these emissions.

“We built our model using open data from the roughly 50,000 neighbourhoods we currently have in Canada,” says Keagan Rankin, a PhD student who is first author of the new paper published in Environmental Science & Technology.

“We looked at aspects such as how many units there are per neighbourhood, what type of housing stock comprises them, what length of road services them, etc. We then used what we know about current construction methods to model what the embodied emissions would be if you built a given number of new homes in the future, using the same distribution of neighbourhood types.

“Once we had that, we were able to ask the question: how much could we reduce those emissions by adopting sustainable construction strategies, such as denser neighbourhoods or better building design?”

The team looked at five strategies that could be implemented to reduce emissions associated with housing construction:

Urban form: Analysis of existing neighbourhoods showed that emissions per unit are lower for those that contain more multi-unit buildings (either high-rise or low-rise) than they are for those that consist mostly of suburban, single-family homes. This strategy would involve a shift toward more of these multi-unit neighbourhood forms.
Higher infill rate: This refers to placing new housing in existing neighbourhoods – areas that are already built up. Because it reuses existing infrastructure, such as roads and water pipes, this new housing can be built with lower emissions than greenfield developments.
Circularity: This strategy involves re-using existing buildings or infrastructure in the construction of new ones. For example, renovating a single-family home to become a multi-unit dwelling would require fewer materials than razing it and starting from scratch.
Material technology improvements: Innovations in the way that materials such as concrete or steel are manufactured can reduce their carbon footprint. This strategy assumed that by 2030, our main construction materials will be produced with 20 to 25 per cent fewer emissions than today.
Best-in-class design: The team found that some housing designs were associated with lower emissions per unit, such as making the home smaller overall through better layouts. Another example involves the proportion of residential building that is underground. Since basements are typically made of carbon-intensive concrete, the same sized dwelling with a smaller basement would have lower emissions.

Multiple strategies will be required

Using the FIG model, the researchers showed that building housing at the rate required to restore affordability without any changes to construction practices would cause Canada to overshoot its climate commitments by 437 per cent.

However, if the above strategies are implemented, the FIG model suggests that they would in fact be able to reduce emissions to below the target level.

The model also showed that while all five strategies are needed to reach the target, some of them had a stronger effect than others. For example, changing urban forms and using best-in-class design together accounted for roughly two-thirds of the improvements needed. By contrast, the strategies of infill, circularity and improvements in manufacturing each accounted for roughly one-tenth of the changes needed.

The researchers found that for the next one to two decades, the most important elements of sustainable building will be designing better buildings and building denser neighbourhoods.

“The numbers are very close, and of course there’s a certain amount of uncertainty associated with all of these estimates, but it was good to see that we came in below the line, because it means the situation is not completely hopeless,” says Rankin.

“There’s no question that building 5.8 million homes by 2030 is an aggressive target. We may not get there, and if not, it would of course make it a bit easier to stay within our carbon budget.

“But we’ve done ambitious things as a country before, such as building a railroad from coast to coast in just five years. This analysis shows that the strategies we already know about are sound, and that all of them will be needed if we are going to prevent the worst impacts of climate change while also restoring housing affordability.”

Researchers often witness – but don’t report – same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals: Study

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 16:44:44 +0000

Researchers often witness – but don’t report – same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals: Study

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 07/17/2024 - 12:44

Cutline

Rwenzori colobus monkeys are among the 1,500 species of mammals known to engage in same-sex sexual behaviour, but a new study from �r�� Scarborough's department of anthropology suggests the true number is likely much higher (photo by Karyn Anderson)

Alexa Battler

Topic

�r�� Scarborough

Subheadline

Many wildlife scientists don't publish accounts of same-sex sexual behaviour because they view it as an anomaly or don't consider it a research priority

Same-sex sexual behaviour is far more prevalent in mammals than research would suggest because scientists often don’t report the behaviour when they witness it in the field, according to a �r�� Scarborough study.

Sixty-five wildlife biologists, ecologists and mammologists were surveyed for the study, which was published in PLOS One. Most of them said they declined to publish accounts of same-sex sexual behaviour because they felt the behaviour was an anomaly too rare to be worth reporting, or wasn’t a research priority of their lab.

These results suggest that the paucity of reports of same-sex sexual behaviour among mammals is attributable to a bias against anecdotal evidence.

“We realized some species we had observed engaging in same-sex behaviour were not included in other published reports and we wondered how often other researchers were witnessing it and also not publishing,” says study co-author Karyn Anderson, a PhD candidate in �r�� Scarborough’s department of anthropology. “We decided the best way to get at this information was to go directly to the source.”

Karyn Anderson is completing her PhD thesis on the Rwenzori colobus monkey (supplied image)

Researchers surveyed for the study said they had seen same-sex behaviour (defined as mounting or other genital contact) in nearly 80 per cent of the 54 species they completed surveys on, which ranged from monkeys to elephants. Yet, about 80 per cent of the researchers never published their data.

There were even 17 species on which there was no research stating that they engaged in same-sex behaviour even though experts witnessed it.

“Some respondents reported observing encounters that lasted close to an hour, while others said they had only seen it a few times or very briefly in many years of observation,” says Anderson, who is completing her PhD in the lab of Associate Professor Julie Teichroeb.

When asked why they chose not to collect or publish their findings, none of the researchers reported a discomfort with homosexuality or any prejudice against it.

The study collected demographic information on its respondents too, though nothing was found to impact likelihood of recording or reporting, including their career stage, the animals they studied, and whether they identified as part of the LGBTQS+ community.

A quarter of the respondents said they didn’t report same-sex sexual activity because they had other research goals they needed to prioritize or because they weren’t leading the studies and didn’t determine what was included.

Responses also backed the theory that popular ideas about the role of same-sex behaviours have led researchers to lump it into other categories in their data collection, with many recording it as instances of establishing dominance, playing or creating social bonds. Only 22 per cent of respondents classified it as a unique behaviour.

Most researchers reported they chose not to record or report because existing evidence on same-sex sexual activity is too dominated by eye-witness accounts.

Anderson notes the bias is a feature of Western approaches to wildlife biology, pointing out that Japanese primatologists, for example, tend to place more importance on researchers’ narrative accounts than their Western counterparts.

“At some point anecdotes were no longer considered rigorous enough for some publications, but they can tell us important things about overarching trends,” Anderson says. “One monkey engaging in same-sex behaviour isn’t necessarily going to tell us a lot about its evolution or function, but if all animals engage in it, that’s a whole different story.”

The study notes that other misconceptions of “rare” behaviours have been disproven once researchers began studying them in a more structured, formal way – such as when wild chimpanzees were found to feed their young by chewing up and spitting out their food, akin to birds.

“I hope this encourages scientists to publish on their observations of behaviours that they perceive to be rare,” Anderson says.

�r�� researchers enhance object-tracking abilities of self-driving cars

rahul.kalvapalle — Wed, 29 May 2024 14:59:42 +0000

�r�� researchers enhance object-tracking abilities of self-driving cars

rahul.kalvapalle Wed, 05/29/2024 - 10:59

Cutline

Sandro Papais, a PhD student, is the co-author of a new paper that introduces a graph-based optimization method to improve object tracking for self-driving cars (photo courtesy of aUToronto)

Safa Jinje

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Artificial Intelligence

Subheadline

The new tools could help robotic systems of autonomous vehicles better track the position and motion of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists

Researchers at the �r�� Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) have introduced a pair of high-tech tools that could improve the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles by enhancing the reasoning ability of their robotic systems.

The innovations address multi-object tracking, a process used by robotic systems to track the position and motion of objects – including vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists – to plan the path of self-driving cars in densely populated areas.

Tracking information is collected from computer vision sensors (2D camera images and 3D LIDAR scans) and filtered at each time stamp, 10 times a second, to predict the future movement of moving objects.

“Once processed, it allows the robot to develop some reasoning about its environment. For example, there is a human crossing the street at the intersection, or a cyclist changing lanes up ahead,” says Sandro Papais, a PhD student in UTIAS in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. "At each time stamp, the robot’s software tries to link the current detections with objects it saw in the past, but it can only go back so far in time.”

In a new paper presented at the 2024 International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Yokohama, Japan, Papais and co-authors Robert Ren, a third-year engineering science student, and Professor Steven Waslander, director of UTIAS’s Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory, introduce Sliding Window Tracker (SWTrack) – a graph-based optimization method that uses additional temporal information to prevent missed objects.

The tool is designed to improve the performance of tracking methods, particularly when objects are occluded from the robot’s point of view.

A visualization of a nuScenes dataset used by the researchers. The image is a mosaic of the six different camera views around the car with the object bounding boxes rendered overtop of the images (image courtesy of the Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory)

“SWTrack widens how far into the past a robot considers when planning,” says Papais. “So instead of being limited by what it just saw one frame ago and what is happening now, it can look over the past five seconds and then try to reason through all the different things it has seen.” 

The team tested, trained and validated their algorithm on field data obtained through nuScenes, a public, large-scale dataset for autonomous driving vehicles that have operated on roads in cities around the world. The data includes human annotations that the team used to benchmark the performance of SWTrack.

They found that each time they extended the temporal window, to a maximum of five seconds, the tracking performance got better. But past five seconds, the algorithm’s performance was slowed by computation time.

“Most tracking algorithms would have a tough time reasoning over some of these temporal gaps. But in our case, we were able to validate that we can track over these longer periods of time and maintain more consistent tracking for dynamic objects around us,” says Papais.

Papais says he’s looking forward to building on the idea of improving robot memory and extending it to other areas of robotics infrastructure. “This is just the beginning,” he says. “We’re working on the tracking problem, but also other robot problems, where we can incorporate more temporal information to enhance perception and robotic reasoning.”

Another paper, co-authored by master’s student Chang Won (John) Lee and Waslander, introduces UncertaintyTrack, a collection of extensions for 2D tracking-by-detection methods that leverages probabilistic object detection.

“Probabilistic object detection quantifies the uncertainty estimates of object detection,” explains Lee. “The key thing here is that for safety-critical tasks, you want to be able to know when the predicted detections are likely to cause errors in downstream tasks such as multi-object tracking. These errors can occur because of low-lighting conditions or heavy object occlusion.

“Uncertainty estimates give us an idea of when the model is in doubt, that is, when it is highly likely to give errors in predictions. But there’s this gap because probabilistic object detectors aren’t currently used in multi-tracking object tracking.” 

Lee worked on the paper as part of his undergraduate thesis in engineering science. Now a master’s student in Waslander’s lab, he is researching visual anomaly detection for the Canadarm3, Canada’s contribution to the U.S.-led Gateway lunar outpost. “In my current research, we are aiming to come up with a deep-learning-based method that detects objects floating in space that pose a potential risk to the robotic arm,” Lee says.

Waslander says the advancements outlined in the two papers build on work that his lab has been focusing on for a number of years.

“[The Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory] has been working on assessing perception uncertainty and expanding temporal reasoning for robotics for multiple years now, as they are the key roadblocks to deploying robots in the open world more broadly,” Waslander says.

“We desperately need AI methods that can understand the persistence of objects over time, and ones that are aware of their own limitations and will stop and reason when something new or unexpected appears in their path. This is what our research aims to do.”

Investment in advanced talent key to Canada’s success in the knowledge economy: �r�� study

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:47:19 +0000

Investment in advanced talent key to Canada’s success in the knowledge economy: �r�� study

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/15/2024 - 11:47

Cutline

(photo by Xavier Lorenzo/Getty Images)

Adina Bresge

Topic

Career Development

Government

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

School of Graduate Studies

Subheadline

Career Outcomes study finds that while �r�� continues to be Canada’s leading generator of academic talent, an increasing number of PhD graduates are finding success in the private sector

PhD graduates are experiencing growing demand for their knowledge and skills across multiple sectors – further evidence that strategic investments in advanced talent support Canada’s global competitiveness.

A new Career Outcomes study, led by the �r��’s School of Graduate Studies, finds that while �r�� continues to be Canada’s leading generator of academic talent, an increasing number of PhD graduates are also finding success in the private sector.

Employers now recognize that universities are both generating new discoveries and training the industry leaders they need, says Joshua Barker, vice-provost, graduate research and education and dean of the School of Graduate Studies.

“What we’re seeing is that �r�� is playing a role in bringing advanced researchers, with their specialized knowledge and skills, into the workforce,” says Barker, who recently joined academic, industry, government and other leaders to discuss the study at an event hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and �r��’s Government Relations Office – part of the New Frontiers for Policymakers policy discussion series.

“The more pathways there are to move back and forth between university, industry and non-profit, the better it is for a robust, resilient and competitive economy.”

The Career Outcomes study shows that professional paths for �r��’s PhD graduates are expanding, based on a survey of publicly available data on roughly 16,000 alumni over the past two decades.

While the post-secondary sector remains the primary employer for PhD graduates, the study shows a nearly 10-per-cent rise in private sector employment for PhD grads when comparing the 2000-2015 and 2016-2021 cohorts – from 19 per cent to 27 per cent.

The top industries hiring PhD graduates include life sciences, engineering, trades and transportation and health and information technology.

PhD graduates in the physical sciences, meanwhile, were the most likely to find employment in the private sector, amounting to nearly 43 per cent of all alumni as of 2022. Major employers included Google, Intel and Royal Bank of Canada.

At present, only about one per cent of Canadians have a PhD degree. But this number may rise following the federal government’s recent commitment to invest $825 million over the next five years to increase the value and number of scholarships for master’s students, PhD students and post-doctoral fellows.

“The recent investment that the federal government made has a huge impact for us, and I think it will help accelerate some of the trends that we’re seeing,” says Barker, adding that sustained support is necessary to develop the pipeline of advanced research talent to fuel Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

From left to right: Darius Ornston, associate professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and interim director of research; Ann Meyer, director, bioInnovation Scientist Program at adMare Academy, adMare BioInnovations; Rafal Janik, COO, Xanadu, Joshua Barker, dean of the School of Graduate Studies and vice-provost, graduate research and education (photo by Simona Chiose)

That includes startups such as Toronto-based Xanadu, founded by former �r�� post-doc Christian Weedbrook, which is working to build the world’s first photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computer.

“We still have a long way to go from a research perspective,” says Rafal Janik, Xanadu’s chief operating officer, who attended the New Frontiers event and talked about why the company recruits PhD graduates. “I think our entire team has post-graduate degrees. I think everybody has some connection to �r�� from that space as well.”

The study also finds a notable uptick in private sector employment among PhD graduates in the life sciences, with nine per cent more graduates from 2016-2021 in industry jobs compared to the previous cohort.

The non-profit adMare BioInnovations is playing a role in moving PhD graduates’ research out of the lab so it can be turned into new treatments and therapies.

"The adMare Academy offers programming that enables PhD graduates and others to see the commercial potential in their research and to understand what it takes to translate that research into commercially viable therapeutics,” says Ann Meyer, director of adMare’s BioInnovation Scientist Program.

It’s not only STEM fields where PhD grads are finding private sector employment.

The study shows that nine per cent of humanities graduates worked in the private sector in 2022, with many in this group exploring fields outside academia including media and publishing (15 per cent), arts and culture (35 per cent), education (10 per cent) and banking and finance (seven per cent).

At the same time, the post-secondary employment pattern for social sciences graduates remains steady. More than half are in tenure-track roles at Canadian universities, and a fifth are in teaching-focused positions at universities and colleges.

Overall, 47 per cent of all PhD graduates over the study period were employed in the post-secondary sector.

With about 1,000 PhD graduates a year, �r�� trains one in seven of Canada’s doctorate holders and plays a pivotal role in advancing the exchange of ideas that drives Canada’s prosperity and progress.

“�r�� is continually replenishing and rejuvenating the workforce across higher education,” Barker says. “These institutions, in turn, train the next generation of undergrad and graduate students who will go out and work across the economy.”

Fighting malaria with math? How one �r�� researcher is studying the evolution of a parasite

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 May 2024 14:23:46 +0000

Fighting malaria with math? How one �r�� researcher is studying the evolution of a parasite

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 05/15/2024 - 10:23

Cutline

(photo by Soumyabrata Roy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Betty Zou

Topic

Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Subheadline

PhD student Youngseo Jeong is using a mathematical model to explore the effect of vaccination on the parasite that causes malaria

A �r�� PhD student is shedding light on a poorly understood phenomenon that could impact vaccination strategies for malaria and other infectious diseases.

The phenomenon, called vaccine-driven evolution, describes possible scenarios where immunization could drive a pathogen to become better at causing disease – for example, by evading the immune system.

Youngseo Jeong (supplied image)

“I’m interested in how interventions like vaccines shape the evolution of virulence and other related parasite traits,” says Youngseo Jeong, a PhD student in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Specifically, she is focused on the Plasmodium family of parasites that are commonly transmitted by mosquitoes and that can cause the life-threatening disease malaria in humans.

The World Health Organization estimates that there were 249 million malaria cases globally in 2022 and 608,000 malaria deaths, with the African region bearing the heaviest burden. With the approval of the world’s first malaria vaccine in 2021and a second vaccine in 2023, vaccination programs have become an important part of the public health strategy to combat the disease.

However, the launch of malaria vaccination campaigns in the African region comes at a time when progress against the disease has stalled and two of the most important tools to prevent and treat malaria are losing their effectiveness. Insecticide-treated bed nets, a mainstay to prevent mosquito bites and kill mosquitoes, offer less protection as mosquitoes become increasingly resistant to the insecticides. Similarly, clinicians are concerned that the spread of Plasmodium parasites resistant to frontline antimalarial drugs will hamper their ability to treat the disease.

Both of these challenges arose as a result of mosquito and parasite evolution in response to a human intervention. Whether a malaria vaccination program could lead to similar changes in the Plasmodium parasite is a key question in the field and one that Jeong aims to answer through her work with Nicole Mideo, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

With the support of a doctoral award from the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium, a �r�� institutional strategic initiative, she is applying mathematical approaches to study how parasites evolve in hosts who have been vaccinated versus hosts who have not.

Jeong’s research, based on a mouse model of malaria, builds on a 2012 study from American researchers that found Plasmodium parasites caused more severe disease after repeated infections of vaccinated mice. However, the researchers did not find any changes to the part of the parasite targeted by the vaccine – a common process by which pathogens evade vaccine-induced immunity – and the cause of the parasite’s increased virulence remains unknown.

To identify the specific traits that are responsible for the parasite’s enhanced abilities, Jeong is using a mathematical model of malaria infection fitted with data from the 2012 study. She will determine which parameters, or parasite traits, in her model can explain the differences between parasites that evolved in vaccinated and unvaccinated hosts.

In the second phase of her PhD project, Jeong will refine the model by including relevant biological processes such as vaccine-induced immunity and the specific parasite characteristics she identified earlier. She will also create a new mathematical model to simulate evolution in a vaccinated host and validate her earlier findings.

“I want to highlight not just evolution at the vaccine target sites, which receives more attention generally, but I also want to draw attention to other pathogen traits and their interactions with host processes that could have consequences for how effective the vaccines are,” says Jeong.

She hopes that her work will contribute to a better understanding of how vaccine-driven evolution in parasites can lead to more severe infection outcomes in both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, and underscore the importance of considering this phenomenon when designing new malaria vaccines and immunization programs.

�r�� researchers' approach to producing neural cells could yield new treatments for Parkinson’s

rahul.kalvapalle — Mon, 13 May 2024 13:03:19 +0000

�r�� researchers' approach to producing neural cells could yield new treatments for Parkinson’s

rahul.kalvapalle Mon, 05/13/2024 - 09:03

Cutline

PhD Student Andy Yang, left, and Professor Stephane Angers, right, at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology are advancing a novel approach to developing dopaminergic neurons (supplied images)

Anika Hazra

Topic

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Medicine by Design

Parkinson's