Pawan Lingras takes massive amounts of data and forms intelligent conclusions from them. He and his students at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax work with several companies — as many as 15 over the last three years — to help them take the data they collect and improve efficiency and or draw important conclusions. With Green Power Laboratories Inc, for example, the goal is energy conservation for the company’s client’s work sites, which can be anything from an office building, a manufacturing plant or a shopping mall. “The goal is to ensure comfort of the occupants, but once you ensure that, you want to optimize the energy consumption,” Lingras says. “Doing physical testing on a building with the heating and cooling plant can be expensive because you need to get data for all kinds of combinations to figure out the ultimate energy conservation.” Instead, he uses the services of ACENET, a regional partner of Compute Canada with fourteen Atlantic Canada member institutions that provides large-scale high-performance computing facilities, to simulate engineering plants to see how they behave under different conditions. “We have to use predictive analytics to come up with mathematical model to capture power plants’ behaviour,” he said. “This is all done with high-performance computing.” Another company he’s working with is called Hanatech Solutions, and he helps the company manage a large stream of data within its many applications and installations. “Storing all that data is a big problem,” he says. “Sometimes these sites are very remote and moving the data is very costly. Our goal is to reduce the costs and ultimately save money. Another company — HomeExcept — makes non-intrusive sensors to monitor activity in a house, for example, to keep an eye on an elderly person who lives alone. The systems are less intrusive than cameras. They will monitor, for example, whether someone is in the bathroom too long, someone has fallen, or they haven’t been to the kitchen for a few days. “This company received multiple awards, including one from the American Association of Retired Persons,” Lingras says. In this case, his research group is building the app and collecting and analyzing the data the company collects. His program — Saint Mary’s University’s M.Sc. in computing and data analytics — attracts a large number of students with experience in global IT and the students do most of the R&D work. The program has dual advantages. First, it gives students real-world experience to help develop them into highly qualified personnel (HQP), and second, it supports startups from a variety of different fields. Those startups in turn help stimulate the local and national economies. “These startups don’t need this expertise year-round, necessarily, so the availability of it on demand works for them, and it provides cutting-edge experience for our students,” Lingras says. The team uses ACENET’s services to simulate the conditions they need and also to analyze the data their clients are collecting.
Showcase Tag: Halifax
Bringing Literature to Life in the Digital Humanities
As a kid growing up in Newfoundland, Kate Scarth loved Lucy Maude Montgomery’s books and now she gets to live that passion every day. The Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Assistant Professor in Applied Communication, Leadership and Culture at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) in Charlottetown says her position is not a traditional academic one. This is primarily because it features a significant public-engagement component, something she explored earlier when she was doing post-doctoral work at Halifax’s Dalhousie University. That project was one that made her perfectly suited to the job she has now. Supported by the Nova Scotia Museum and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the project, which she worked on with ACENET’s Chris Geroux, features the literature of Halifax. The idea was to use her background in British literature, and her knowledge from having written her thesis on London’s suburbs, to continue that work — with a Canadian bent. “I wanted to do something local, with a public-engagement side,” she says, adding that her adviser had done a course focused on getting people to read literature and then getting them out to experience places mentioned in the books. A Compute Canada scholarship for the digital humanities helped her with the digital dimensions of her project. “They matched humanities scholars to a Compute Canada technical expert,” she says. “I was matched with Chris Geroux from Halifax and he really helped accelerate the project and possibilities.” Ultimately, the project is a soon-to-be-released map-focused website called Halifax Literary Landmarks. It features a map with popups about what literary happenings took place where. Text and audio versions of the same information are also available. “L.M. Montgomery is one of the writers we look at,” Scarth says. “She went to Dalhousie for a year and later worked as a reporter in Halifax. She also set an Anne of Green Gables novel in a fictional Halifax. Anne visits the old burial grounds, for example.” Scarth’s goal was to highlight the literary side of Halifax. “I want to show people there is rich literature about Halifax and help them learn more about where they live.” The website has been housed on a virtual machine on the Compute Canada cloud. “I can’t even begin to express how helpful it’s been to have Chris working with me,” she says of her ACENET experience. “When we were hiring computer science students, he helped draft the ad and sat in on interviews. It’s been so helpful for me not coming from that background.” Her interest in the digital humanities continues in her current position. She’ll soon launch an online journal of L.M. Montgomery studies, something she hopes will attract scholars, librarians, English academics and even independent researchers. “The journal will have a really wide audience,” she says. “I’ve also been sitting on an advisory committee with Parks Canada because they’re redeveloping the Anne of Green Gables interpretation centre and I’m developing an online course on the same subject.” At UPEI, she has taught digital humanities and digital literacy courses, and she teaches a series of courses called “putting arts to work” — the idea being to get students to think about the skills they’re building in their Arts studies. Scarth’s job seems custom-made to suit her strengths as she completes the mandate of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, which is “to forward the informed celebration of Montgomery’s work.”
Redesigning Halifax with Data Cave Technology
It’s an opportunity that most cities don’t get very often – the chance to develop 16 acres of prime real estate in the heart of Halifax’s downtown, just steps away from the waterfront. The development land comes courtesy of a new initiative that will remove a 40-year-old downtown white elephant called the Cogswell Interchange, a leftover vestige of a highway project that was scrapped in 1971. HRM city planners have created an arresting vision for the property once the Interchange is hauled away over the next few years – a plan that includes multi-residential, office and retail complexes, an inter-model transit terminal, major downtown green space, multi-use trails stretching north along Barrington Street and a large open plaza at the end of the Granville Mall. Designing new traffic flow patterns through the city to compensate for the loss of the interchange is a major priority for the city – one that’s being helped by the ACENET Data Cave located at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. In 2013, HRM municipal planning staff took part in an experiment at SMU that used the Data Cave technology to help design one of the roundabouts that will be created to help ease traffic flow once the Cogswell Interchange is gone. ACENET provides universities and other groups with access to one of the most powerful computer networks in Canada and the experts who run it – an accessible tool that is facilitating research and innovation across the region. The Data Cave is part of ACENET’s suite of services – a computer laboratory that allows users to create complex 3-D images of anything from molecules and machine parts to downtown city blocks. John Charles is the city planner behind the North Park Street Roundabout design. He says the Data Cave sessions were an experiment in city planning. “We attended an open house at the Data Cave about two years ago, and we were struck by the possibilities it offered for municipal design,” he says. “We decided to see if we could use our AutoCad files to create a 3-D model that we could use for the design.” Once in the Data Cave, ACENET staff converted the files into a high speed program capable of projecting a 3-D image of what the intersection will look like when the new roundabout is in place. Charles says the virtual projection allowed his team to visualize the myriad of considerations that must be taken into account during the design. “We have to consider things like pedestrian flow, active transportation flow, landscaping, historic building streetscapes, tree removal. It’s quite a complex process.” Charles outlined his initial experiences with the ACENET Data Cave at the High Performance Computing Symposium 2014, Compute Canada’s national conference for advanced research computing, in June. He told the audience at the Halifax conference that overall the experiment was positive. “There were a few problems with the quality of the projection but that was mostly to do with the quality of our own files,” he says. “We’ve been working on improving the quality of our files since then and I can see the Data Cave as becoming a very useful planning tool for us in the future.”