You are here

Original Research Themes

Original Research Projects

biomedical

  • The assessment and detection of global warming is of great concern to the world now. This project aimed to detect quantitative characteristics of observed climate changes and to develop a new mathematical theory for analyzing non-stationary and nonlinear remote-sensing signals. A key outcome was a master dataset for the latest version of the Alberta Agroclimatic Atlas. The dataset includes both digital data and map images. The agroclimatic changes over Alberta since 1901 to 2002 were quantitatively documented and the analysis shows that the Alberta agriculture has benefited from the changes. In addition, the team discovered internal upstream running solitons from satellite images over clouds, which can be used to predict severe weather. A major theoretical result was the establishment of the statistical confidence limit for the Hilbert-Huang Transform for analyzing nonlinear and non-stationary time series. An example was analyzed for the length-of-day data and the El Niño signals were detected from the data. All the results above have been published in refereed journals or books. This project was completed in 2004.

  • This project aimed to understand the behaviour of infectious disease process in a population in order to prevent its establishment, control its spread, and reduce its ability to persist. Hospital infection, pandemics and bio-terrorist attacks are becoming a global concern. Mathematical modeling is indispensable as infectious disease data are not the result of controlled experiments but are part of observational data arising from complex naturally occurring phenomena. This project completed in June 2002.

commercial

  • Efficient operation of an enterprise requires that resources be deployed in an optimal manner. Careful advance planning is necessary but not sufficient if changes in demand or availability are intrinsic to the application area. To sustain efficient operation the ability to react in a timely manner to changes in resource demand and availability is also essential. Project objectives were to devise new tools and algorithms for obtaining exact or approximate solutions to resource allocation and scheduling problems.
    The project  completed in June 2002.
     

  • This project focused on mobile communication systems and uncertainty in expert systems. Cellular wireless networks are widely used today to carry voice and text. Increasingly, users are demanding to transmit images, videos and other multimedia data simultaneously. Therefore there is a need to provide quality of service that satisfies the requirements of different types of traffic and different classes of users in cellular wireless networks. The project  completed in June 2002.

information technology

  • Sound mathematics is essential in all modern technological developments. As we build increasingly complex systems, mathematical reasoning becomes more difficult and errorprone. Therefore, a computer system is needed that mechanizes the process of doing mathematics. There are two main kinds of mechanized mathematics systems: computer algebra systems that perform many kinds of symbolic computations, and computer theorem proving systems, which support the construction of machine-checked proofs. The objective of this project is to develop a new approach to mechanized mathematics in which computer algebra and computer theorem proving are merged without sacrificing power or soundness. This project completed in March 2003.