Phill Snel

Ontario siblings – all U of T alumni – tap maple syrup hobby to build booming business

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:43:59 +0000

Ontario siblings – all U of T alumni – tap maple syrup hobby to build booming business

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 04/30/2024 - 16:43

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The Tomory family at Pefferlaw Creek Farms, from left to right: Tony, Melisande, John, Paul Sr. and Ben (photo by Phill Snel)

Phill Snel

Topic

Our Community

Alumni

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Subheadline

The Tomory family's connections to U of T run deep, with a total of 11 family members having attended the university

Every spring, the warming weather sees the tree sap run again, beckoning the Tomory family to renew their annual effort to harvest the quintessential Canadian product: maple syrup.

What started as a hobby farm has yielded sweet results for the siblings. Their 200-acre Pefferlaw Creek Farms, set in the rolling country hills near Zephyr, Ont., around 80 km northeast of Toronto, is the second-largest maple syrup producer in the province.

The farm is owned and run by brothers John, Ben, Tony and Eugene Tomory, all of whom earned undergraduate degrees at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering – with John and twins Ben and Tony going on earn graduate degrees in engineering at U of T.

The Tomory family’s ties to U of T don’t stop there: two more brothers, Paul and Leslie, earned engineering degrees at U of T, while sister Melisande completed a degree in geology. Father Paul Sr. and his brothers Eugene and Nicholas also earned engineering degrees at U of T, while their mother Teresa completed the first doctorate in the family at the university in 1980.

In addition to U of T, another constant of the Tomory family has been maple syrup.

“We grew up in the country, and my parents had about 10 acres of property. There we would make maple syrup in the backyard,” says Ben. “It was something you did in the spring. Those first warm days after a winter, you could wear a T-shirt, running around collecting firewood and sap and eating sugar all day. That was my childhood and there was always kind of a, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do this for a living!’ and this kind of thinking about it.”

Maple taffy, a reduced maple syrup, is poured on a freezing table and rolled with a wooden stick for tasting (photo by Phil Snell)

Ben says the family purchased the farm as an investment in 2015. “I love the outdoors and nature, so we wanted to buy a property with a nice forest. We found this one. Basically, from there, we had the maple trees we needed," he says.

At the time, Ben had a job that allowed him to take six weeks of vacation, so he and the family decided to pour their time into building a maple syrup business. “Eleven years later, here we are.”

Pefferlaw has since gone from strength to strength. In the past year, the company rose from fifth to second in maple syrup production in Ontario thanks in no small part to the company being able to tap into the family’s collective engineering expertise – which spans the chemical, mechanical, civil and electrical engineering fields.

“We have the biggest evaporator in Ontario now. Reverse osmosis has penetrated the maple syrup industry quite a bit, and we are implementing a bunch of newer technologies with what we do,” says Ben. “All the process design within the facility has been 100 per cent an application of my education and even professional experience. That also goes for the installations in the forest because it’s plumbing design – it’s all kinds of fluid dynamics, vacuum pumps, transfer pumps, things like that.”

Ben Tomory sprays down equipment to clean it in the Pefferlaw Creek Farms barn (photo by Phil Snell)

The impressive main building, built during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, is a red-roofed structure with concrete flooring, large timber framing and massive electrical wiring and piping for liquid transport.

“It’s been a cool project to work on, and I was basically our project manager. This whole building is all building science,” says Ben, who has a decade of experience in construction.

He says the family's vision was to build a destination, not just a utilitarian facility. “We want to draw people in during the maple syrup season, so we moved an old barn here to our property and preserved a bit of Ontario heritage at the same time.”

Rows of maple syrup samples adorn the window of the barn, appearing like stained glass (photo by Phil Snell)

The efforts have borne fruit, with Pefferlaw Creek Farms seeing a staggering uptick in visitors this past March, coinciding with the annual March break holiday for students in Ontario’s public schools.

With this surge in customers, several of the siblings and their father gather to tackle the demands. Activities include a tapping tour, maple taffy tasting in the sugar shack, syrup tasting and a pancake breakfast. On weekends there is live music to accompany breakfast.

With the grandchildren now teenagers, the operation sees all hands contribute to March break tours and operations, allowing three generations of Tomorys to come together in this sweet family business.

Researchers aim to predict cardiac events with AI technique used to analyze earthquakes

geoff.vendeville — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:16:07 +0000

Researchers aim to predict cardiac events with AI technique used to analyze earthquakes

geoff.vendeville Mon, 07/25/2022 - 10:16

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(photo by Mutlu Kurtbas/Getty Images)

Phill Snel

Topic

Breaking Research

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Hospital for Sick Children

Research & Innovation

Sebastian Goodfellow, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto's department of civil and mineral engineering, and his team have partnered with researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) to help detect and diagnose heart arrhythmias.

The project, supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, aims to leverage techniques developed by Goodfellow and his colleague in their previous work, which involves using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze seismic data. While the goal in those projects was to learn how to recognize the signals that precede seismic events, such as earthquakes, the new project will focus on a different kind of data: that generated from electrocardiograms, or ECGs.

Sebastian Goodfellow

Machine learning techniques developed in the context of geology could be adapted to pick up on the warning signals that precede cardiac events, such as arrhythmias, which affect roughly 700 critically ill children at SickKids each year. Goodfellow and his team are collaborating with Dr. Mjaye Mazwi – a staff physician in the department of critical care medicine at SickKids and an associate professor in U of T's Temerty Faculty of Medicine – and the team at Laussen Labs, a multidisciplinary research group at SickKids.

Writer Phill Snell sat down with Goodfellow to talk about the project.

How did you get involved in this project?

I joined Laussen Labs in 2017 to bring my signal-processing expertise to the group. My PhD research focused on applied seismology, which is the study of seismic waves generated by engineering processes such as mining.

At the time, Laussen Labs had just started acquiring physiologic waveform data, such as ECGs, which are the electrical signal of the heart. The analysis and modelling of high-frequency time series data require a skillset called digital signal processing. When analyzing earthquake seismograms during my PhD, and afterwards in the private sector, I acquired this skill set.

Is it unusual to see this kind of collaboration between mineral engineering and medicine?

It’s more common than you may think. Many of the important problems of today and tomorrow spill across borders, cultural divides and fields of knowledge.

For example, Laussen Labs developed a bespoke time-series database for the storage of physiologic waveform data at SickKids. The lead database architect was a hydrologist by training whose previous experience was developing a database for the storage of drone photography for a flood plane mapping application.

Over time, the gap between AI in mineral engineering and AI in health care has become smaller and smaller for me. Beyond publishing proof-of-concept studies in academic journals, deploying AI models in the real world is very hard and the challenges span mineral engineering, health care, and beyond.

Can you describe the new project in more detail?

We are building and deploying a model that detects and diagnoses common pediatric heart arrhythmias using continuous ECG data. Currently, this is a task staff physicians in the ICU can do very well.

The challenge is there are only two staff physicians on duty at any given time to service 42 ICU beds, and detecting and diagnosing heart arrhythmias is just a small part of their job. As a result, these arrhythmias often go undiagnosed for a period and the longer the delay, the worse the outcome for the patient.

The idea is to use our expert clinicians to train an AI, which can match their performance and monitor all ICU beds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking for arrhythmias.

This animation shows an ECG signal transitioning from a normal rhythm to an arrhythmia. In the top right corner is the model score for a particular pediatric arrhythmia called Junctional Ectopic Tachycardia (JET). When the signal transitions, you can see the model score increase.

What are the key challenges to developing such a model?

The algorithms are actually pretty straightforward; the challenge is what we call the “translation gap.”

You can find thousands of academic papers on AI, machine learning and deep learning applied to health care. However, if you dig a little deeper to see how many of those AI models actually made it to clinical deployment, it’s less than 0.1 per cent. We made the decision to keep our model simple, so we could focus on translation.

The translation gap is a result of multiple factors. These include difficulties creating computational infrastructure that can reliably ingest data for real-time classification, the requirement of a production-grade Machine Learning Operations platform for serving, monitoring, and re-training AI models, regulatory challenges integrating AI models into clinical domains, and concerns about responsible validation and bias, sometimes described as “algorithmic fairness”.

The team that can close this gap must include a wide range of expertise including bio-ethics, MLOps, law, cloud, software development, human factors, cognitive psychology, digital signal processing and machine learning.

Can you talk about your experience in AI?

Before joining U of T, I was the AI Lead at a startup in the mining industry called KORE Geosystems. We developed an AI product that automated various parts of geotechnical and geological core logging workflows, for example, rock type classification and fracture counting.

In this role I had to deploy AI models that geoscientists relied on to do their work. I was able to bring this experience to Laussen Labs where they were running up against similar challenges.

When you’re building products, you’re forced to start from the business requirements and work backwards to the technical solution. Because products are built for users, it’s no surprise why this is the preferred approach.

Do you think people will be reluctant to rely on a machine rather than human experience to predict arrhythmia?

Trust is always a challenge when introducing any new technology into an established workflow, and AI is no exception. It is imperative to think about your AI model as a product from the very start, which will involve those end users – in this case, doctors – in documenting requirements and ultimately building trust.

It also matters how we present the performance of a model to the end user. We need to use metrics that map to clinical key performance indicators, and we need to present those metrics in a transparent manner over long periods.

Most people have no clue how a plane achieves flight or how a jet engine works but they feel safe flying. The reason is there is a one in 20 million chance of dying in a commercial airline plane crash. So, an arrhythmia model that is consistently performing at the level of a board-certified cardiologist will build trust.

U of T alumnus Olugbenga Olubanjo one of 15 finalists for $1.7-million Earthshot Prize

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 17:00:25 +0000

U of T alumnus Olugbenga Olubanjo one of 15 finalists for $1.7-million Earthshot Prize

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/14/2021 - 13:00

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Olugbenga Olubanjo, who graduated from U of T Engineering in 2019, is the founder and CEO of clean-tech startup Reeddi Inc., which aims to support people living in countries where energy infrastructure is unreliable (Ian Willms/Panos Pictures)

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Global

Startups

Sustainability

University of Toronto alumnus Olugbenga Olubanjo’s startup Reeddi Inc. has been named one of 15 finalists of the inaugural Earthshot Prize.

The clean-tech startup created by the recent graduate in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering’s department of civil and mineral engineering is one of only three finalists in the “Fix Our Climate” category, according to a recent video announcement made by Prince William.

The Earthshot Prize was launched last year by the Duke of Cambridge, with plans to award five winners every year for the next decade.

“Over half a century ago, President Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ programme united millions of people around the goal of reaching the moon,” Prince William said.  “Inspired by this, The Earthshot Prize aims to mobilise collective action around our unique ability to innovate, problem solve and repair our planet.  

“I am honoured to introduce the 15 innovators, leaders, and visionaries who are the first ever Finalists for The Earthshot Prize.  They are working with the urgency required in this decisive decade for life on Earth and will inspire all of us with their optimism in our ability to rise to the greatest challenges in human history.”

In Olubanjo’s case, Reeddi’s portable and rechargeable batteries, powered by solar charging stations, support people living in parts of the world where energy infrastructure is unreliable. Rented for $0.50 a day, the units provide affordable and dependable energy to those who would otherwise unable to obtain the service.

Over 600 households and businesses now receive clean electricity via Reeddi’s product every month. The company has a goal of serving 12,000 new households and businesses monthly by the end of 2021.

In advance of this weekend’s live announcement U of T Engineering writer Phill Snel recently caught up with Olubanjo to ask him about being a finalist in the global competition and what’s next for the company.

What was your reaction to being nominated for the Earthshot Prize?

We were very excited about the nomination. It’s a reward for years of hard work that our team here at Reeddi has put into unlocking a model that seems impossible in a challenging business environment.

We are very happy to see how far we have come as company in order to be recognized for such a prestigious award. We’re even more pumped to leverage the support from the award to scale our innovation and accelerate it’s impact in more energy-poor communities and regions.

How have perceptions of your company changed over the years?

The progress has brought good credibility for the company. People who had originally questioned our model are starting to see something there. We have also learned quite a lot, operationally speaking, about what to do, and not do, as far as operation and innovation is concerned.

It’s a challenging journey with a lot of highs and lows, but we are excited about being able to walk through the early prototype period to where we are today. We have built a solid reputation now and people take us more seriously because of some of the visible results of our innovation and progress. We are still just starting to establish ourselves and have a long way to go.

What’s the transition from inventor to manager been like?

It’s been a lot of learning. I guess that is one of the things I love most about innovation and technology. As the company scales, the founders and founding team have to increase their combined knowledge and managerial capacity to sustain the venture’s growth.

There has been a lot of reading, seminars, trial-by-error learning and mentorship from experienced advisers. Our focus is to build a solid operational system that will effectively scale our product and facilitate allied business opportunities. It’s not been an easy journey.

I think the beauty of growth is that it’s fulfilling. You know you are not who you used to be – and you are better than who you are last month in knowledge and capacity. Also, we are lucky to have smart, motivated and dynamic team members who work tirelessly and are very passionate about scaling and accelerating the impact of our innovation.

Reeddi operates on two continents with very different time zones – North America and Africa. How do you manage?

I guess my internal system has normalized that – it has always been the case when we started the company while I was a student at U of T. So, I guess it’s pretty normal now. The operational systems we have in place makes things run smoothly as a company.

What do you hope to do if Reeddi wins the Earthshot Prize?

The funding will be leveraged to build and optimize the hardware and digital infrastructures required to scale our innovation and accelerate its impact to more communities and regions.

How did your U of T Engineering education prepare you for your current role?

From clear communication to research, I left U of T equipped with essential and excellent skills needed to run the firm. We do a lot of communication, analysis, forecasting and research at Reeddi, which are skills I picked up at U of T.

What advice would you have for students considering an entrepreneurial path at U of T?

Just do it. If you are interested in anything, then chase it. In the failure comes the victory. When we started Reeddi as an idea, we had people tell us it’s a joke. But we believed in ourselves and pressed on. These same folks celebrate us today. So, damn the uncertainties and just go for it. The beauty of entrepreneurship is even if you fail, and things don’t work at the time, you are equipped with some practical skills that cannot be learned by just reading. It scales the way you think by default and changes the way you approach anything and everything.

What’s next?

We are working on a couple of allied innovations that will leverage some of the exciting infrastructure we have built to scale Reeddi. We are aware this is a long-term play and are seeing a couple of allied innovations and opportunities we are positioning ourselves to capture. We plan to scale our innovation globally and we are very excited about the numerous opportunities that lie ahead.

This U of T-designed lab on wheels roams the city, gathering data on air pollution

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:39:03 +0000

This U of T-designed lab on wheels roams the city, gathering data on air pollution

geoff.vendeville Fri, 02/26/2021 - 12:39

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From left : Associate Professor Marianne Hatzopoulou, Keni Mallinen (in vehicle) and Arman Ganji with the UrbanScanner (photo by Phill Snel)

Phill Snel

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Pollution

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

A vehicle with flashy chrome finishes and high-tech, roof-mounted scanners is getting a lot of admiring looks as it rolls around Toronto.

Meet UrbanScanner, a mobile testing laboratory on wheels developed by researchers in the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. Built and driven by researchers in the Transportation and Air Quality group led by Marianne Hatzopoulou, an associate professor in the department of civil and mineral engineering and Canada Research Chair in transportation and air quality, the vehicle takes detailed measurements of air pollution as it varies over space and time.

Hatzopoulou and her team, including research associate Arman Ganji and master's candidate Keni Mallinen, have partnered with Scentroid, a Toronto-based company developing sensor-based systems for urban air pollution monitoring, to create UrbanScanner.

The vehicle includes a 360-degree visual camera, a lidar (light detection and ranging) system, a GPS transponder and an ultrasonic anemometer, as well as sensors for temperature, relative humidity, particulate matter and certain gas-phase pollutants.

A platform on the roof of the vehicle streams data to a cloud server, with air pollution measured every second and paired with the camera and lidar images. The ability to collect detailed location information enables air pollution data to be overlaid on city maps.

UrbanScanner can compare its real-time measurements of air pollution with features of a particular street or neighbourhood, such as traffic flow, number and height of trees and local building forms. It can also reveal patterns over time, whether it’s the daily rush hour or seasonal variations.

“Since September 2020, UrbanScanner has been collecting air quality data across Toronto, both along major roads and within Toronto neighbourhoods,” Hatzopoulou says.

Over the course of a single month UrbanScanner can log more than 2,280 kilometres of driving, or more than 100 hours of data collection. That adds up to over 250,000 data points.

“This massive database will continue to grow as UrbanScanner collects data across seasons and will help us predict air quality in space and time, providing crucial information about population exposures in the city,” Hatzopoulou says.

U of T entrepreneur to put reliable power in the hands of Nigeria's people

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 19:15:37 +0000

U of T entrepreneur to put reliable power in the hands of Nigeria's people

geoff.vendeville Wed, 07/03/2019 - 15:15

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Olugbenga Olubanjo and his startup Reeddi aspires to supply clean, affordable and portable power to Nigeria. He's holding two electricity capsules containing lithium-ion batteries (photo by Phill Snel)

Phill Snel

Topic

Global Lens

Alumni

Faculty of Engineering

Global

Hatchery

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Startups

Olugbenga Olubanjo remembers fist-pumping in celebration on Victoria Day when he found out his startup had won an award of US$10,000.

Olubanjo, a master’s student in civil engineering at the University of Toronto, and his team at Reeddi (pronounced “ready”) aim to bring clean, affordable and portable power to the people of Nigeria, freeing them from an expensive and unpredictable energy grid.

The Reeddi team includes two other U of T students: Osarieme Osakue, a master’s student in civil engineering and the company’s director of communications, and Joshua Dzakah, who is completing a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering.

Reedi Inc was a runner-up in the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge, its third award this year. It also secured a provisional patent.

The seeds of Reeddi were sown in 2017 while Olubanjo was in Toronto. While speaking to friends or family back home, he was often suddenly disconnected. He found out the interruptions – and the source of his frustration – were caused by all-too-frequent power outages in Nigeria.

Olubanjo recalls being “at Massey College at night with light everywhere” and couldn’t imagine returning home where it was like “going back to darkness.” In his native Nigeria, there was sometimes access to just two hours of electricity a day. Olubanjo set out to find a solution to a daily problem faced by many back home.

Some 600 million Africans, including 70 million Nigerians, live without access to electricity. Alternatives for household lighting, cooking and other needs can be dangerous and expensive. Kerosene lanterns are hazardous when used indoors due to the risk of fires or air poisoning. They also often require travelling long distances to obtain fuel.

Vast amounts are spent on creating electricity from polluting sources, further degrading air quality in Nigeria.

Olubanjo’s initial idea was to create a solar “umbrella” capable of charging mobile phones, but after discussion with friends and engineering colleagues he began to envision something on a larger scale.

The current project proposal outlines a large standalone, solar-powered structure that is about half the size of a bus shelter. It has interactive screens at eye-level that control the user experience and provide access to removable Reeddi capsules. Each watertight capsule is about half the size of a 12-pack of soft drinks and comprises a lithium-ion battery with external USB and AC plug.

Customers would pay rent of up to 50 cents (US) per 24 hours for a 250 watt-hour (Wh) capsule. A standard 250Wh capsule is enough to provide a combined seven hours of lighting via two 150 lumen LED bulbs, fully charge three mobile phones and provide four hours of laptop power. Capsules can also be connected and scaled up in a modular fashion. Doubled-up, they would create a 500Wh unit, and so on, for greater power needs such as running appliances.

The capsule can be returned within the rental period or earlier if depleted. As an incentive to return the capsule on time, customers are awarded points to be used towards future exchanges.

“The impact it can bring really drives me and makes me excited,” said Olubanjo. The clean and affordable power source would provide households with more stable energy with scalable options.

As proof of concept, Reeddi created a mock-up prototype of one capsule last December, then created a working prototype of a capsule as a contest entry. The company is on track to run a micro-scaled pilot in Nigeria with five interactive working capsule prototypes this summer.

Reeddi has been internationally recognized for its innovative technology and business model. In February, it won the North American Regional Award for the Best Emerging Startups in Decentralised Energy Track at the IEEE Empower a Billion Lives Challenge held at Georgia Tech. And, in April, Reeddi won $5,000 as the winner of the MIT 2019 Clean Energy Prize, in the national grid track.

Olubanjo says he’s had a lot of help with the project. Ideas, prompts, expertise and questions from friends, colleagues and faculty contributed to its development.

He also benefited from U of T Engineering’s Hatchery NEST program, which provided 3D printing, business questions and opportunities for collaboration.

Yu-Ling Cheng, a professor in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry, acted as an adviser and mentor, as did Bill Nussey, the CEO of Solar Inventions.

Olubanjo says the project has led to a “lot of sleepless nights.” But, he adds, “what kept me going was the possibility of having an impact on millions of lives.”