From Red Pandas to AI Innovations, and so much more at Summer Research Day
Summer Research Day at CUE provides students conducting research over the summer with an opportunity to present their work to their peers, mentors, faculty, staff, and others within the CUE community. This year, 19 students presented their research. With so many great projects and research outcomes over the summer, the following is a teaser of the amazing work happening at CUE!
IoT-Enables AI Audio Narration for the Visually Impaired
Jeyaram Nadesan (graduate student mentored by Dr. Nasim Hajari)
Jeyaram had previously worked on projects that used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify objects photographed in a scene and discovered an opportunity.
How could this be used to help people with impaired vision?
So his research began—combining simple computers, cameras, the cloud, AI and internet of things (IoT) devices to develop a prototype that describes its environment to the wearer.
Jeyaram donned a baseball cap, fitted with a webcam on the cap and a raspberry pi on the back.
“Capture,” he said.
A live feed of the webcam, visible on his laptop, captured a still frame of the lecture hall and sent it to the cloud for processing. From there, AI was used to analyze the image and create a written description of the scene. The written description was then processed as speech, and a speaker played the audio.
“It is a lecture hall. There is a man in the front row wearing a suit. In the second row, there are two people sitting with laptops, and one person appears to be writing in a notebook,” the speaker said.
The rudimentary prototype was successful in each of Jeyaram’s three attempts, showcasing how this technology could be incorporated into a glasses-like gadget for people with visual impairments.
Further work will go into code optimization, reading latency, and integrating processing further with cloud services. Jeyaram also wants to explore adding an additional camera for stereoscopic imaging so the AI can estimate distances and better understand the depth of the wearer’s surroundings.
The role of enrichment in endangered red panda welfare
Tayler Onufrichuk (undergraduate student mentored by Dr. Jenna Congdon)
Zoos are home to a variety of species, including endangered or protected animals. In their homes, these animals are not only cared for, but the zoo, as an intuition, plays an important role in conservation, education, and research.
Zoos provide a variety of enrichment opportunities to their animals to encourage them to interact with their surroundings in a more natural way.
Through the summer, supported by an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA), Tayler worked at the Edmonton Valley Zoo with support from the staff to explore how Red Pandas’ behaviours may change when music is introduced to their environment. Similar research had previously been done on dolphins, chimpanzees and piglets, where music was found to enrich their environment.
Tayler’s study introduced natural music with frog vocalizations, and traditional classical music, to Kalden, a resident red panda. The purpose was to determine if the addition of music would increase activity levels.
While the natural sounds and classical music did not have a significant impact on the panda’s activity, tree foraging increased when the natural sounds were played and scent marking was more prominent during the classical music sessions.
Overall, the music did not appear to have an adverse effect on the red pandas. Further studies may include additional pandas, alternative musical genres, and exploring how tempo or frequency ranges may impact behaviour.
Improvements to the Logic Game
Hamza Ahmed (undergraduate student mentored by Dr. Jonathan Strand and Dr. Eslam AbdAllah)
The Logic Game was an idea CUE’s Philosophy Professor, Dr. Johnathan Strand had thought about for a long time. After teaming up with Assistant Professor of Information Systems Security & Assurance Management, Dr. Eslam AbdAllah, they recruited CUE’s undergraduate student, Hamza, to code the game. Hamza was supported by an NSERC USRA.
Throughout the summer, Hamza took a proof-of-concept game to a fully laid out, functional online game that is now classroom-ready (almost!). Ultimately, the game aims to help students learn how to construct a sound, logical argument, and to improve students’ skills in assessing the arguments of others.
Through his work over the summer, Hamza was able to add in additional judging functionalities, better administrator controls, improvements to scoring systems, and other optimizations.
Oil Sands Development and Ecosystem Impact
Evan Capp (undergraduate student mentored by Dr. Xin Chen)
The rising number of tailings ponds in northern Alberta has caused Indigenous communities in the area to have growing concern over how the wastewater is impacting the local environment.
With funding from the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Association (TEKA), Evan Capp has taken the first steps in a broader research plan by undertaking a literature review to understand the impacts of wastewater and tailings ponds on the surrounding environment.
His literature review not only looked at western science data, but explored how traditional ecological knowledge can be added in parallel to the analyses.
While we cannot share the results just yet, this study is quite promising and phase 2 is well under development.