Tag Archives: National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

University of Guelph (Canada) gets money for new nanotechnology antimicrobial delivery vehicles

Leave a reply

It’s usually an agricultural story when I cover nanotechnology happenings at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada).  However, this July 10, 2015 news item on Azonano is focused on pharmaceutical,

EastGate Biotech Corp., an emerging pharmaceutical company aimed at utilizing drug delivery innovations in the development of improved novel formulations and alternative dosage forms of existing biologically active molecules, has announced that its research collaborator, the University of Guelph, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology received a grant from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

A July 7, 2015 Eastgate Biotech news release, which originated the news item, describes the nature of their previous collaboration with the University of Guelph but nothing much about the work being undertaken under the auspices of the latest NSERC grant,

Previously the company announced that its research collaboration with the University of Guelph involved measuring the antimicrobial activity of the company’s natural antibacterial products, Cleanezze™ and Vclean™ (www.nano-essentials.com).   Cleanezze™ is a long acting hand sanitizer that contains 3 different natural antibacterial compounds.  Vclean™ is a natural, non-toxic and highly effective concentrate for the elimination of dangerous germs from surfaces of fruits, vegetables, kitchen tools, etc.  The results of this study demonstrated the effectiveness of these products.

The research team at the University of Guelph led by Principal Investigator, Dr. Cezar Khursigara will continue to study the antimicrobial activity of our products.

“We are pleased with the grant awarded to our collaborators at the University of Guelph”, says Anna Gluskin, EastGate’s CEO. “This support will serve to validate the effectiveness of the company’s natural antibacterial products and provide the competitive benefits for the demanding marketplace looking to combat increases in microbial outbreaks”, continued Ms. Gluskin.

I went to the NSERC website for more information and found a list of 2015 research grant recipients listed by institution, which yielded this likely entry under the University of Guelph (Note: I have not replicated the table formatting of the original entry),

Khursigara, Cezar
Department: Molecular and Cellular Biology – Molecular and Cellular Biology
RGPIN
Probing the molecular interactions and architecture of bacterial cell division proteins
1501
5
$34,000.00

That’s all I can find by way of details. By the way, Eastgate Biotech is a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario.

Visualizing how your online behaviour is being tracked—Emily Carr University’s (Canada) Lightbeam

Leave a reply

Before you got too excited this visualization tool is an add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox. That said, this seems pretty nifty, from the Oct. 30, 2013 Emily Carr University news release (Note: A link was removed),

“Emily Carr University’s visualization research for Lightbeam enables users to understand their personal relationship to online tracking,” says Emily Carr’s Amber Frid-Jimenez, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media.  She continues: “Our visualizations for Lightbeam will contribute to increased transparency about how personal information is collected and propagated by third parties, a key issue of online privacy.”

Here’s what one of the visualizations looks like,

Hypothesis 1: Browsing History [downloaded from http://research.ecuad.ca/simcentre/2013/10/28/press-package-lightbeam/]

Hypothesis 1: Browsing History [downloaded from http://research.ecuad.ca/simcentre/2013/10/28/press-package-lightbeam/]

The design team has this to say about the visualization (from their Hypothesis 1 webpage),

hypothesis #1
The Clock design aims to engage people who aren’t currently interested in privacy issues. The tool allows people to explore their own personal internet browsing history in daily, weekly, monthly and more longterm views.

There are more details about the Lightbeam project and the research team, from the news release,

Emily Carr University Research announces the launch of Lightbeam, a new Add-on for the popular Firefox browser that enables users to visualize online data tracking in real time. Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, partnered with the University on a year-long research project to improve Lightbeam’s interactive visualizations. The Emily Carr University team was led by Associate Professor Amber Frid-Jimenez, who worked with student design researchers Sabrina Ng, Joakim Sundal and Heather Tsang and a group of developers at Mozilla, led by Dethe Elza, to develop the visualizations of of the tool which will shed light on the online collection of information by third parties. This research was supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Mozilla Foundation, and is a project of the Social + Interactive Media (SIM) Centre, headed by Kate Armstrong.

The research team focused on three key areas of the visualization:

  • Browsing history: to interest users in privacy issues with an interface that facilitates exploration of their past browsing history and the third party connections that have been involved in this data;
  • Deep dive into time: to provide experts, power-users and those already interested in privacy issues with an interface that explores their relationships with trackers, and their enabling Web sites, to reveal patterns in the near term or over larger anonymized, aggregated datasets in the future;
  • Metrics as widgets: to provide users with an interface that displays simple figures and browsing history in real-time as single numbers and visual graphs.

The Lightbeam visualizations demonstrate the forward-looking research in social and interactive design provided by Emily Carr University. The Lightbeam visualizations will be important to helping web users understand the role of third party data tracking that shapes so much of the web and make informed choices about their data collection practices.

For anyone who wants to see the press package, you can find everything including the news release and images here.

While Emily Carr University is well known locally, it should be said that it’s located in Vancouver, Canada and it’s official name is Emily Carr University of Art + Design.