August 29, 2018 — Carol Yeung (Year 4 IndE) along wtih fellow U of T Engineering student Paul Seufert (Year 4 EngSci) and are about to head back to school after having an unforgettable summer spent travelling the world. But what’s unusual about their experience is that their time abroad has the potential to influence urban policy for years to come.

They are among 12 post-secondary students from across the GTA, including four from U of T, who have been participating in a fellowship program organized by Sidewalk Toronto – a partnership between Waterfront Toronto, a government-led initiative to develop Toronto’s waterfront, and Sidewalk Labs, the subsidiary of Alphabet (which also owns Google) that seeks to use technology to improve urban living.

Sidewalk Toronto is in the early stages of proposing a new community in Toronto’s Quayside, an undeveloped waterfront location that will be a testing ground for what a “smart city” could look like.

That’s where the Sidewalk Fellows come in.

The 12 students were selected from a group of over 650 applicants and come from a range of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, health sciences and urban planning. They’ve been tasked with writing a report for Sidewalk Toronto with recommendations on how they would envision Quayside’s future, to be published in October.

Sidewalk Toronto wanted the fellows to take cues from cities around the world when crafting their report – so they sent them across North America and Europe to meet with innovative city builders and gain insights on creating effective solutions to urban issues.

Their travels took them to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Boston, New York and Vancouver.

The fellows met with the Sidewalk Labs team in New York City, saw how well-designed European waterfronts could bring people to public spaces, and learned about the different ways Vancouver was innovating to provide more affordable housing.

“It was seeing those on the ground insights – it felt like I learned so much more than I would if I went there by myself for even months and months,” says Seufert.

For Yeung, the experience has made her realize the importance of public engagement and consultation – a practice she hopes Toronto’s city builders will continue to improve upon.

“That’s a culture I want to find in Toronto if it already exists or build up if it’s in its starting stages because that was very interesting to see,” she says.

The fellows will be presenting their findings to Sidewalk Toronto’s senior leadership in October and will help to inform the Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), says Megan Wald, director of design and communications at Sidewalk Labs.

“The University of Toronto fellows have brought a passion for their city and curious intellect that contributed to critical research on, and exploration of, how urban technologies can create more sustainable, affordable and liveable cities,” she says.

This drive to build better cities will make for a report that could have influence beyond the Quayside development, says Pamela Robinson, the Sidewalk Fellows’ academic adviser as well as a Ryerson University associate dean in Faculty of Community Services and an associate professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning.

“There’s a lot of runway left of this project to both make a contribution to the planning of Quayside but also the conversations about city building in Toronto as a whole,” she says. “This is the first smart city project of its scale in Toronto but we will see other projects that try to bridge the technology-urbanism divide over the next years to come.”

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This story originally appeared on U of T News.

August 9, 2018 — MIE researchers studied the eye movements of drivers at busy Toronto intersections and found that more than half failed to make necessary scans for pedestrians or cyclists at right turns.

During a summer that has seen a string of vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-cyclist accidents in the city — with 21 fatalities as of June — this study gives new insight into a driver’s misallocation of attention when making turns on busy city streets.

“There are a lot of visual and mental demands on drivers at intersections, especially in a dense, urban environment like downtown Toronto,” said Nazli Kaya (MASc candidate), who is leading the research under the supervision of Professor Birsen Donmez, Canada Research Chair in Human Factors and Transportation.

“Drivers need to divide their attention in several directions, whether it’s other vehicles, pedestrians or road signs and traffic signals — traffic safety instantly becomes a major concern,” she said.

This is the first study to date that used eye-tracking equipment to accurately assess where drivers were looking when turning at an intersection.

The participants ranged in age from 35 to 54, all with more than three years of driving experience. The drivers were required to make right turns at Palmerston Avenue from Bloor Street, a signalized four-way intersection, and at Major Street from Bloor Street, an uncontrolled T-intersection leading to a smaller road. Both locations required drivers to safely turn right across a dedicated cycling lane along Bloor Street.

The researchers’ study found that:

• Eleven of the 19 drivers failed to gaze at an area of importance, where cyclists or pedestrians would be located, before turning.
• All attentional failures were related to not making frequent over-the-shoulder checks for cyclists.
• There were more failures turning into Major Street, due to parked vehicles blocking drivers’ views of the bike lane.
• Attentional failures were more likely for those who drove more frequently in downtown Toronto.
• It appeared that drivers less familiar with an area were more cautious when turning.

“The results were quite surprising,” said Donmez. “We didn’t expect this level of attention failure, especially since we selected a group that are considered to be a low crash-risk age group.”

Donmez believes changes to road infrastructure is needed to improve traffic safety, pointing to the inconsistent implementation of bike lanes as one of the many hazards facing Toronto streets. “I think it’s an infrastructure issue. I don’t think it’s an education issue. When you look at the bike lanes in the city — they appear over here, but disappear there — the more unpredictable the road rules are, the more challenging it is.”

Until those infrastructure changes are made, “Drivers need to be more cautious, making over-the-shoulder checks, and doing it more often,” said Donmez.

“The takeaway for pedestrians and cyclists: drivers aren’t seeing you. Not necessarily because they’re bad drivers, but that their attention is too divided,” added Donmez. “When crossing a street, your assumption should be that the car doesn’t see you.”

This research was recently presented at the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals (CARSP) Conference. In the fall, Kaya and Donmez are planning to build on their work, conducting road tests with a larger participant pool and more intersection locations throughout the city.

This story originally appeared in U of T Engineering News.

July 31, 2018 – Beating cancer is a race against time. Developing radiation therapy plans —individualized maps that help doctors determine where to blast tumours — can take days. Now, Aaron Babier (MIE PhD Candidate) has developed automation software that aims to cut the time down to mere hours.

He, along with co-authors Justin Boutilier (MIE PhD candidate), supervisor Professor Timothy Chan (MIE) and Professor Andrea McNiven (Faculty of Medicine) are looking at radiation therapy design as an intricate, but solvable, optimization problem.

Their software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to mine historical radiation therapy data. This information is then applied to an optimization engine to develop treatment plans. The researchers applied this software tool in their study of 217 patients with throat cancer, who also received treatments developed using conventional methods.

The therapies generated by Babier’s AI achieved comparable results to patients’ conventionally planned treatments — and it did so within 20 minutes. The researchers recently published their findings in Medical Physics.

“There have been other AI optimization engines that have been developed. The idea behind ours is that it more closely mimics the current clinical best practice,” says Babier.

If AI can relieve clinicians of the optimization challenge of developing treatments, more resources are available to improve patient care and outcomes in other ways. Health care professionals can divert their energy to increasing patient comfort and easing distress.

“Right now treatment planners have this big time sink. If we can intelligently burn this time sink, they’ll be able to focus on other aspects of treatment. The idea of having automation and streamlining jobs will help make health care costs more efficient. I think it’ll really help to ensure high-quality care,” says Babier.

Babier and his team believe that with further development and validation, health care professionals can someday use the tool in the clinic. They maintain, however, that while the AI may give treatment planners a brilliant head start in helping patients, it doesn’t make the trained human mind obsolete. Once the software has created a treatment plan, it would still be reviewed and further customized by a radiation physicist, which could take up to a few hours.

“It is very much like automating the design process of a custom-made suit,” explains Chan. “The tailor must first construct the suit based on the customer’s measurements, then alter the suit here and there to achieve the best fit. Our tool goes through a similar process to construct the most effective radiation plan for each patient.”

Trained doctors, and often specialists, are still necessary to fine-tune treatments at a more granular level and to perform quality checks. These roles still lie firmly outside the domain of machines.

For Babier, his research on cancer treatment isn’t just an optimization challenge. “When I was 12 years old, my stepmom passed away from a brain tumour,” Babier shares.

“I think it’s something that’s always been at the back of my head. I know what I want to do, and that’s to improve cancer treatment. I have a family connection to it. It adds a human element to the research,” says Babier.

 

July 9, 2018 – Professor Mark Fox (MIE) was recently named associate director of research for the University of Toronto’s new School of Cities. With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, the initiative brings together many research disciplines across U of T to solve pressing global issues facing urban areas.

Fox, a distinguished professor of urban systems engineering, envisions engineering researchers at the forefront of these efforts — as they always have been.

“Engineers are the foundation of city building, we are on the ground floor of this work. In fact, civil engineers literally built the floor,” says Fox. “You give me any discipline in engineering at U of T, and I can point to not one example, but probably 10 examples of city-related research.”

“Infrastructure, transportation resilience? That’s civil. Electrical engineers, they’re working on smart grids, a major issue around the world. Meanwhile, mechanical engineers are looking at water purification, service robots and clean energy, and industrial engineers are working on social services and healthcare,” he says.

“Biomedical engineering — you may think, what does that have to do with city building? Think about cities that better accommodate the aging and infirmed. How do we develop tools to enhance people’s lives? I could go on.”

Fox says that engineers bring unique perspectives to complex challenges not only through their research, but in the way they think. “The way engineers approach solving problems is really, really important,” he says. “Not everyone can break down a problem, measure and evaluate each component in order to find solutions — that whole approach is not common outside of engineering, and it’s a necessary approach to city building.”

He also points to several U of T Engineering programs designed to develop a deeper understanding of urban issues and enrich the thinking of the next generation of engineers.

“The Engineering Strategies and Practice course for first-year students is so vital to changing the way our students approach fundamental design problems,” says Fox. He also credits the Faculty’s Master of Engineering in Cities Engineering and Management, which allows graduate students to explore cities as complex systems, equipping them with the skills to understand how infrastructure affects economic prosperity and quality of life.

The disparity of the urgent challenges facing cities means that they are being addressed by researchers working in fields across the University of Toronto’s three campuses. The School of Cities, Fox says, is critical to catalyze collaboration across traditional disciplinary lines, and to optimize funding opportunities and generate meaningful solutions.

“This will only succeed to the extent that all of us across the greater U of T is involved. School of Cities has to have a critical mass of people, it has to have a critical mass of funding, and it has to be something that gets researchers focused on a project for an extended period of time. Not two, three years, but five to 10 years,” said Professor Fox.

One of Fox’s first undertakings in his new leadership role will be to create a process for faculty members to submit their research ideas. A subset of projects will then be selected and provided with initial funding. The School of Cities’ leadership has already identified several potential key research challenges, focusing on:

• The fundamental models and theories behind the science of city building. In this area, Fox and Professor Dan Silver (Sociology) have launched the Urban Genome Project, which involves researchers from diverse fields of management, geography, urban planning and architecture;
• Equalizing opportunities within cities, with an initial focus on affordable housing; and,
• Cities by Design, which aims to develop novel approaches for designing a city block, neighbourhood or village. The Smart Villages Project, funded by the Connaught Global Challenge Award, is led by researchers in the department of mathematics, Munk School of Global Affairs and the Faculty of Law.

Fox stresses that interdisciplinary collaboration will be key to solving all of these urgent urban issues.

“We’re hoping that we can be an environment where we can create a culture of coming together — across Faculties, departments, from downtown, to Mississauga, to Scarborough,” he says.

“When U of T says that we have 200 faculty working on cities related research, I believe it’s incorrect. I think it’s more like 2,000.”

Photo caption: Professor Mark Fox (MIE) overlooks the Toronto skyline from the new Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Fox was recently named associate director of research for the University of Toronto’s new School of Cities.

This article originally appeared in U of T Engineering News.

June 22, 2018 – Anston Emmanuel (MechE 1T7+PEY) is about to start a coveted job as an active safety controls development engineer at automotive giant General Motors – a position he secured, strange as it sounds, thanks in part to an unsuccessful effort to launch a biomedical startup at The Entrepreneurship Hatchery.

Though the startup in question – based around a drill attachment to improve knee surgery outcomes – would seem to have little relevance to one of the world’s biggest automakers, Emmanuel says the experience gave him a clear edge when first applying for an internship at GM’s Canadian Technical Centre in Markham, Ont.

“I was told one of the main reasons I was brought on was because they saw I could take initiative within GM,” says Emmanuel, who graduated in U of T Engineering’s Convocation ceremonies on Tuesday, June 19.

“They saw that during the interview process – that I was someone who was a self-starter and could bring a sense of entrepreneurship within the company.”

Emmanuel’s experience is far from unusual. While all entrepreneurs hope to succeed, the reality is the vast majority of startups fail. However, the skills and experience gained by launching a startup – generating innovative ideas, developing new business models, bringing investors and other stakeholders on board – are increasingly in high demand by a wide variety of employers.

At GM, for example, Emmanuel says CEO Mary Barra has made it a priority to transform the 100-year-old automaker into a nimble innovation machine as it competes with not just rival car companies, but Silicon Valley tech giants eager to disrupt a $2 trillion industry with new technologies like self-driving cars.

“I see that culture shift taking place within the company,” Emmanuel says. “Innovation is highly valued. We attempt to seek IP [intellectual property] at every opportunity and reward employees for doing so. New ways of thinking are being encouraged.”

In fact, there’s even a term for what graduates like Emmanuel bring to established companies: “intrapreneurship.”

The shifting corporate landscape is among the reasons U of T has significantly boosted its entrepreneurship offerings over the years. The university now boasts nine accelerators across its three campuses that help foster student and research startups at various stages of development and in a wide variety of areas, from artificial intelligence to health care.

There are also some 200 courses and programs available and countless entrepreneurship-related events. They range from Impact Centre’s two-week Techno boot camp to a year-long entrepreneurship program run by UTEST that seeks to support startups based on U of T research. At the Rotman School of Management, meanwhile, MBA students are regularly paired with startups at Creative Destruction Lab, giving the entrepreneurs access to management expertise and the MBA students real-world problems to solve.

“[Students] are seeking entrepreneurial experiences as part of their education,” U of T President Meric Gertler said in a speech earlier this year. “In fact, they have figured out that starting a firm is the quintessential form of experiential learning.

“The kinds of competencies one develops – from entrepreneurship to problem-solving, teamwork skills, and resilience – are invaluable, whether the startup succeeds or fails.”

Emmanuel admits it was tough to pull the plug on his startup, but he says the feedback his team was getting from surgeons suggested a host of complexities that would have taken a significant time commitment to address.

“In the end it was logical choice for us given where we were with our degrees,” he says.

As for the skills he picked up along the way, Emmanuel says he’s now putting them to good use at GM, with 180,000 employees on five continents, as he works on developing the safety systems needed for the autonomous vehicles of the future.

“There’s a lot of initiative that’s often required to operate in a large company,” he says, “and many of those skills came through my hands-on experience at the Hatchery.”

This article originally appeared in U of T Engineering News.

June 19, 2018 – On June 19, MIE faculty and staff are proud to see a new crop of students receive their degrees at Convocation Hall. As these newest engineering alumni go on to contribute to our society in a myriad of ways, here are the stories of just some of the many promising students who will be graduating this month from MIE.

Marina Freire-Gormaly (EngSci 1T0+PEY, MIE MASc 1T3, PhD 1T8) has wanted to make a global impact since her undergraduate years. During her undergraduate thesis project with Professors Yu-Ling Cheng (ChemE), Director of the Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN), and Murray Metcalfe, Professor of Globalization, “I got a taste of both research and global engineering at work,” said Freire-Gormaly.

The project focused on rural electrification in Bihar, India. The experience spurred her to pursue a master’s degree at MIE with Professors Aimy Bazylak and Heather L. MacLean (CivE), and then a PhD under the supervision of Professor Amy Bilton.

“The program at MIE, the community, location and access to resources helped me to decide to stay here,” she said. “And I knew I wanted a PhD project that was personally motivating.”

Conducting research in Professor Bilton’s Water and Energy Research Lab (WERL), she’s focused her attention on developing a solar-powered drinking water treatment system for remote communities.

“I could feel that while I was toiling in the lab or modeling on the computer, that the results could be used to improve the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Freire-Gormaly, who receives her PhD today at Convocation Hall, hopes to build on her work in Professor Bilton’s lab, now as a post-doctoral fellow. MIE recently spoke to Freire-Gormaly to learn more about her time here, and how she hopes to change the world in the years to come.

How will you use your engineering degree to make a difference or to
contribute to society?

I hope to use the skills, tools, and approaches from my engineering degree to increase access to clean energy and clean drinking water to all of society.

What do you hope to accomplish in the next 10 years?

I hope to help alleviate the energy and water crises facing historically marginalized and remote communities by building on my research experiences at MIE. I’m very optimistic for the journey over the next 10 years.

How does it feel to now be a part of the MIE alumni community?

The MIE alumni community is a great network of accomplished alumni. I’m also really excited that the U of T Engineering CONNECT has also reached such a huge number of members too. I’m really looking forward to connecting more with this MIE alumni community and giving back as a mentor to the next generation.
Describe your experience at MIE in one word.

Intriguing!

What have been the highlights of your academic career at MIE?

During the PhD, I was able to present at several international conference, work towards publishing five peer-reviewed journal papers, including a recent publication in Desalination. I also designed, built and constructed new experimental equipment to characterize the membrane fouling under intermittent operation, did fieldwork collecting groundwater from a well in Nobleton, ON, collaborating with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, developed a modeling tool for designing future solar powered water treatment systems and worked with a great team of students in the WERL lab.

I also thoroughly enjoyed serving the MIE community as the president of the AMIGAS (Association of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Graduate Students) in 2014-2015 and supporting AMIGAS as the VP Finance from 2015-2018. It was a great team of students and a great way to contribute to the MIE community by organizing events and activities to engage everyone to participate together.

This spring, I was also humbled to be nominated by the Cross-Disciplinary Programs Office for the TATP Course Instructor Teaching Excellence Award for using engaging methods in teaching ‘APS510: Innovative Energy Technologies and Global Energy Systems ‘ twice in the fall of 2017 and fall 2016. I honed many of these teaching methods while mentoring young people teaching a course I developed called ‘Sustainable Energy and Entrepreneurs’ in the Da’Vinci Engineering Education Program for several summers throughout my PhD.

Looking back on your time here, do you have any people you’d like to thank?

I am also very thankful for the NSERC CGS-D scholarship, the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto for the fellowship and Conference Travel Grant, and to the Province of Ontario for the Queen Elizabeth II/Dupont Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology, the Hatch Graduate Scholarship for Sustainable Energy, the Paul Cadario Doctoral Fellowship in Global Engineering, the Mary Gertrude L’Anson Scholarship and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) Personal Scholarship.

I have been very fortunate to work with Professor Amy Bilton for my PhD. Her mentorship, leadership and work-ethic has been instrumental. I greatly appreciate her guidance, assistance troubleshooting the experimental equipment and systematic approach to everything. Her dedication to global engineering research, teaching and her students is inspirational. Working with her, helping set-up the lab and seeing it grow over the past years has been an incredible experience.

The support of my family, friends, mentors and the MIE faculty and staff was instrumental in achieving this goal. I am really grateful for all the support I received throughout my time at MIE. The Institute for Sustainable Energy, Institute for Water Innovation, Centre for Global Engineering and iLEAD were all a part of shaping my academic career.

June 18, 2018 – On June 19, MIE faculty and staff are proud to see a new crop of students receive their degrees at Convocation Hall. As these newest engineering alumni go on to contribute to our society in a myriad of ways, here are the stories of just some of the many promising students who will be graduating this month from MIE.

Industrial engineering students Richard Ren, Madeleine Santia, Jessica Ma and Chris (Ze Hao) Zhu did nothing short of incredible work for their MIE Capstone client, Salesforce. The American cloud computing company, which centres around Customer Relationship Management software, tasked the students to develop a strategy that would optimize the percentage of outbound calls resulting in an answer.

The group’s engineering solutions, supervised by Professor Timothy Chan, not only garnered high praise by their client, as well as a second-place win at the MIE Capstone Showcase, but it made a lasting impact on the company’s operations. Salesforce is incorporating the group’s work into its fiscal planning and execution strategy. And not only that, the company offered jobs to both Ren and Santia at their San Francisco headquarters. Ren will be working as an Associate Analyst in Sales Strategy, while Santia will also be joining as an Associate Analyst in Marketing Analytics & Strategy.

MIE recently spoke to the group to learn more about their capstone success and what they plan to accomplish post-graduation.

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Richard Ren (R), Madeleine Santia (M), Jessica Ma (J) and Chris (Ze Hao) Zhu (C):

Can you tell us about your capstone project?

J&R: We developed an operating model for the Sales Development Representative (SDR) team to follow that consisted of operational guidelines to maximize efficiency and of the organization. We created hypotheses regarding organizational change backed by data analytics, which we tested by conducting pilots. Parts of the operating model are already in use with plans for other segments to be implemented in the near future. The SDR Organization makes ~2 million calls a year, so we were very proud of our end deliverable as any operational improvement has a massive impact.

M&C: Building on operational guidelines and existing operations research techniques, we built a prototype of a long term scheduling tool that maximizes the overall effectiveness of an SDR throughout the day. This future vision can be used to increase connectivity with other organizations and to introduce automation.

How does it feel to now be a part of the MIE alumni community?

J: I personally benefited immensely from the alumni community while in school, and I’m excited to pay it forward by sharing my experiences and advice with other fellow MIE students.

R: It feels awesome. I am happy to now be in a position to potentially help students, as many Alumni contributed to my great engineering experience.

C: I’m proud to be a part of such an extensive community, and look forward to learning from and contributing to it!

M: I’m looking forward to being in a position to mentor the new generation of students in MIE. Throughout university, I’ve been lucky enough to have several upper year and graduated mentors so I want to pay that forward.

Describe your experience at MIE in one word.

J: Growth.

R: Rewarding.

C: Nurturing.

M: Enriching.

What have been the highlights of your academic career at MIE?

J: Through the capstone project, getting the opportunity to hear Michelle Obama’s talk about education and female empowerment at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s biggest conference.

R: Meeting all the amazing people.

C: Learning from the diverse individuals both in and out of the classroom, and also going on an academic exchange to ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

M: In the same vein as Jessica, hearing Michelle Obama’s speech was one of the best moments of my academic career. As my fourth-year thesis, I studied the impacts of verbal and sexual harassment on female engineering interns so her message really hit home for me.

What do you hope to accomplish in the next 10 years?

J: I hope to be utilizing my engineering skills in the global development sector.

R: I am very passionate about immigrant empowerment and poverty alleviation due to my upbringing. I hope to see myself making a significant impact in those two issues in the near future.

C: I hope to create a venture that positively changes how some people experience life.

M: Beyond encouraging women to pursue degrees in engineering, I would like to use the knowledge and information accumulated through my thesis studies to positively transform the perception and rhetoric surrounding women in engineering and to promote the proper and fair inclusion of women in the engineering workforce.

 

June 15, 2018 – On June 19, MIE faculty and staff are proud to see a new crop of students receive their degrees at Convocation Hall. As these newest engineering alumni go on to contribute to our society in a myriad of ways, here are the stories of just some of the many promising students who will be graduating this month from MIE.

Before Taoxin Jiang (MASc 1T8) began university, he wanted to become a pilot. He ended up studying another passion – robotics – as an undergrad, before moving his focus to researching fluid mechanics as a grad student at MIE, under the supervision of Professor Markus Bussmann.

Jiang, who will receive his master’s degree on June 19, has always wanted to expand his horizons, exploring different engineering fields, all with the same vigour and passion. His robotics background would later peak his interest in machine learning.

And after taking Professor Roy Kwon’s financial engineering course, he’s become inspired to apply machine learning techniques in the financial sector. Since January, the data-driven graduate has been working at RBC to help predict long-term credit loss.

“Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning. I’m excited to be using some simple machine learning approaches to my job right now, and I hope I can continue to build on these skills as I advance in my career.”

Jiang still hasn’t given up his dream of flight school, however. MIE recently sat down with him to discuss convocation and what his promising future holds.

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Describe your MIE student experience in one word.

Opportunities.

How has MIE prepared you for your career?

In general, engineering is about learning not just the mathematical side, but the practical side. It’s about having a hands-on approach to trying out an equation, not just solving it. I think that will be extremely valuable in my career.

What have been the highlights of your academic career at MIE?

Meeting Professor Bussmann and getting to research under his supervision – he’s such a great supervisor, not just from an academic standpoint, but he really cares about the success of his students.

Another highlight would be taking Professor Kwon’s class. It made me realize that I wanted to go into financial engineering.

What do you hope to accomplish in your engineering career over the next 10 years?

I want to try out different stuff. I want to apply my knowledge in all different things. I’ve always been like that. I initially wanted to become a pilot. And then I wanted to design planes. But I love math, so I went into robotics, and then fluid mechanics and then finance. I just want to try out different things. Now that I have this great opportunity at RBC, I decided to apply to flight school as something I can focus on in my spare time!

What I suggest to all students in engineering, is to try different things. I didn’t know finance was even an option when I studied at Waterloo. But here, MIE has allowed me to expand my knowledge.

June 14, 2018 – On June 19, MIE faculty and staff are proud to see a new crop of students receive their degrees at Convocation Hall. As these newest engineering alumni go on to contribute to our society in a myriad of ways, here are the stories of just some of the many promising students who will be graduating this month from MIE.

Fourth-year industrial engineering students Spencer Canner, Oghosa Igbinakenzua and Aadil Sookia have created a website and algorithm to help guide readers’ discovery of books. Their website, Newvella, is a novel approach to artificial intelligence and machine learning – comprehensively automating personalized recommendations of books based on a reader’s personal taste in genres.

Though the recommendation tool may sound similar to algorithms behind Netflix or Spotify, the group – who originally developed this tool as part of MIE’s Capstone course, under the supervision of Professor Scott Sanner – has actually taken the idea of user recommendations a step further.

“If you watch The Office on Netflix, the system will say, ‘here is a list of similar shows to it.’ What we want to do is have a system that really learns your tastes,” explains Sookia. “If you watch The Office and The Walking Dead but you don’t like Suits, there are specific recommendations to you, as opposed to if you watched The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine but you don’t like Parks and Recreation.”

The result is a more diversified, and yet better contextualized user recommendations. When a user visits Newvella, they’ll be asked to select their favourite genres. From there, they are given a series of books from each genre to indicate whether they like or dislike them. Based on this information, the system filters through a database of more than 1,500 books to then present to the reader a set of personalized recommendations, clustered in genres and cross-sections of genres:

“Machine learning tends to rely on the algorithm – the machine side – in order to make accurate recommendations. But there hasn’t been much focus on how humans interact with that system,” said Igbinakenzua

“That’s where the industrial engineering part comes in to play,” added Canner. “Most recommendations are shown in lists or grids, and that’s overwhelming for the user. Think of Netflix, and how many suggestions they give you based on what you’ve watched – it’s a lot. What they are lacking is the user interaction part, which is Newvella’s area of focus.”

Although the students are graduating on June 19 and beginning new jobs – Canner at Shopify, Igbinakenzua at Deloitte, while Sookia is moving to Seattle to work at Zillow – that won’t mean Newvella is coming to an end. The group hopes to continue improving Newvella in their time off and plan to license their platform. In the next few years, they hope to see their algorithm used in movie theatres, public libraries and on video game platforms.

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Convocation Q&A with Spencer Canner (SC), Oghosa Igbinakenzua (OI) and Aadil Sookia (AS)

How does it feel to now be a part of the MIE alumni community?

AS: There have been so many amazing graduates from this program. I feel like I’ll always be an ambassador for industrial engineering at U of T. I think we’re really at the cutting edge here, and I’m really proud to be part of this and to be a part of the rich history here.

What have been the highlights of your academic career at MIE?

SC, OI and AS, in unison: Capstone. [The group won first place and The Peri Family Industrial Engineering Design Award at the MIE Capstone Showcase]

Describe your MIE student experience in one word.

AS: Empowering.

OI: Enlightening.

SC: Rewarding.

What do you hope to accomplish in your engineering careers over the next 10 years?

AS: I’m really interested in youth development and leadership. I’m really interested in creating a space that allows youth to find the leader within them, and enable them to do the best that they can. I hope to be a mentor within the workplace but also within my community.

OI: I know that I want to be contributing to Nigeria and Africa’s growth, whether it’s education or infrastructure. If I can gain significant knowledge through my work and experiences over the next 10 years, I would want it to be applied to the development of something great there.

SC: Having been working in the tech industry, I’ve seen firsthand all these new technologies coming out. And at Shopify right now, I had the chance to sit down with a 67-year-old, and they couldn’t stop talking about how easy it is to use and how it allows them to do so much. I envision myself working to make technologies accessible to everybody. As tech advances, I want to see it advancing towards accessibility, to make sure that no one is left behind.