Data & Technology

News: Insect Forecasting Comes to UBC Vancouver Campus this Summer

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 18:49:39 +0000

News: Insect Forecasting Comes to UBC Vancouver Campus this Summer dlopez Fri, 08/12/2022 - 11:49

The Sticky Pi project is funded in part by UBC’s Campus as a Living Laboratory (CLL) program, managed by the Sustainability Hub, which aims to integrate academic research and teaching with campus planning, infrastructure, operations, and community development by using the campus as a place to test new ideas.

At a time when most people are closely watching the weather, a unique project coming to UBC’s Vancouver campus could become the blueprint for forecasting insect activity across the city.

This summer, researchers plan to set up 60-70 unique cameras across the UBC Vancouver campus and UBC Farm. The cameras, known as Sticky Pi, combine optics and a sticky trap. They catch bugs and take pictures of them. Computers then use artificial intelligence to determine exactly what the insects are, and where and when they were trapped in real-time.

The researchers plan to eventually deploy the camera system across Vancouver in 2023.

Advanced monitoring of insects, like Sticky Pi, is a relatively new technology. Entomologists typically catch insects in traps, then count and identify them by hand, which is time consuming and doesn’t allow for real-time monitoring.

Like canaries in coal mines, insects are effective indicators of global change in ecosystems. Recent evidence suggests that some important insect groups may be declining while others proliferate, the consequences of which are already being felt in global food supplies, as outbreaks of pests and the overuse of inputs compound issues of land use, habitat loss, and climate change.

“It’s almost like a weather forecast of insects. This project will enable UBC to monitor insects in real-time on a scale never done before and, importantly, allow researchers to compare insect activity in natural habitats, urban campus landscapes, and the agricultural setting of UBC Farm,” said Dr. Quentin Geissmann, postdoctoral research fellow in microbiology and immunology in the faculty of land and food systems, and co-lead of the Sticky Pi project.

“By creating real-time data for the public, UBC will serve as an early alert system for monitoring insects pests – these maps and pest alerts will be communicated to growers and other agricultural stakeholders across Canada.”

In a pilot program using Sticky Pi camera traps for digital detection of insect pests in agriculture, Geissmann identified invasive, strawberry-eating weevils, an urgent concern in Canada. The group also detected limitations to current trapping technology that misses some classes of insects and/or underestimates insect populations.

“The next phase of the project will use these tools to help us understand how light pollution affects biodiversity, as well as how climate change-related events like last summer’s heat dome affect insect presence. Developing baseline data will help us to monitor the impact of human activity on biodiversity in the long term,” said team member Daphne Chevalier, a master’s student in plant science.

The Sticky Pi project is funded in part by UBC’s “Campus as a Living Laboratory” (CLL) program, managed by the Sustainability Hub, which aims to integrate academic research and teaching with campus planning, infrastructure, operations and community development by using the campus as a place to test new ideas.

“CLL is a strategic initiative at UBC that utilizes the unique capabilities of our academic campuses to have real impact within the broader community,” said Angelique Pilon, director of Urban Innovation Research, and manager of the CLL program. “We are committed to responding to some of the most pressing societal issues of our time by bringing together unique collaborations of researchers, students, staff and partners to explore and test innovative solutions to complex challenges, and to share our experience and learning to advance sustainability practices and policies both on and off campus.”

The Sticky Pi project is also a citizen science initiative, where community members are invited to get involved. The research group will soon be conducting “hackathons” to help improve trap technology and will work with community volunteers who want to take part and provide feedback. The technology is also all open source.

Learn more about the CLL Project

Data & Technology

Ecological Systems

Interview: Dr. Juli Carrillo, Daphne Chevalier, and Pierre Girod

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 18:19:13 +0000

Interview: Dr. Juli Carrillo, Daphne Chevalier, and Pierre Girod dlopez Fri, 08/12/2022 - 11:19

Profile of a new living labs project by Dr. Juli Carrillo, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, supported by Daphne Chevalier, Masters of Science student in the Plant Science program and Pierre Girod, Postdoctoral Fellow. We asked them about their insect detection project, and hopes for applied outcomes in the future.

The digital detection web for on-campus insects is part of a bigger project, which started before the CLL competition. The overall project evolved from Dr. Quentin Geissman’s research, which focused on understanding the circadian rhythms of insects to manage insect pests.

“This is especially important for growers, since it allows them to spray pesticides during the right time of the day, namely when insects are there” explains Dr. Juli Carrillo, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and project lead. “The first monitoring device developed by Quentin was created using a 3D printer and glue and we tested it in my backyard.” Over time, the research team started scanning for insects and training a dataset for machine learning that could identify insects on its own.

Daphne Chevalier, a master's student studying the effects of artificial light on insects, joined the project later. “Finding how artificial light at night influences insect communities and insect circadian rhythms is extremely important in urban agro-ecosystems,” says Daphne, “and this project has been extremely gratifying, especially in terms of community involvement.” In fact, the project team carefully documents the project, making sure that the code and protocols used are open-source and available for others to use. Furthermore, they are planning on organizing more outreach events in the coming fall.

“There have been many challenges, for sure” mentions Juli “due to supply chain disruptions, there has been a Raspberry Pi shortage, which means we were able to build fewer monitoring devices”. “And it’s not just the Raspberry Pis,” adds Daphne. “I’m still working on finding ultrasonic microphones. This has led us to become more creative, for example by borrowing some of this equipment.”

The team also describes issues related to the insect traps. In fact, big insects often escape, while some insects get eaten by birds and other animals, which inevitably leads to some taxonomic bias in the findings. Furthermore, there are ethical concerns related to animal welfare, which leads the team to reconsider the way they identify insects.

When it comes to studying the effect of artificial light on insects, the challenge has been finding dark places on the UBC campus. “I was shocked to find that UBC at night was unbelievably bright” explains Daphne. “Insects and birds need dark spaces for key aspects of their behaviour. For instance, a lot of insects send minuscule bioluminescent signals to one another for reproduction.”

Team members hope that their study will have implications on municipal and industrial lighting, which are relatively unregulated.

“We also hope to create a sort of map using our cameras” adds Pierre Girod, a postdoctoral researcher involved in the project. “This would help to inform the wider agricultural community, but also to track new potentially invasive species.”

Learn more about the CLL Project

Data & Technology

Ecological Systems

Interview: Dr. Lorien Nesbitt, Angela Rout

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 16:50:13 +0000

Interview: Dr. Lorien Nesbitt, Angela Rout dlopez Fri, 08/12/2022 - 09:50

2021 Award recipients Dr. Lorien Nesbitt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management, and Angela Rout, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Forest Resources Management share more about charting new ground with their work on urban forests.

The 5G data-driven natural asset management and integration project is looking at the application of different technologies to better understand urban forests and the people who live with them.

“Urban forests, namely trees and associated vegetation in cities, are a complex ecosystem,” explains Lorien Nesbitt, project lead. “Humans interact with them and get benefits from them, but they are also managing them.” The project team is trying to understand how such complex systems work. More specifically, they are using data collected from ground-based sensors, drones, and mobile phones to understand human movement patterns and how people generally use green spaces.

“Once we collect all the data, we can start drawing linkages to learn how human movements at a larger scale can inform, for example, the design of a park” adds Angela Rout, a postdoctoral researcher working on the project. The team also collected data through surveys about the use of green spaces.

“We are charting new ground with this project,” Lorien responded when asked to talk about difficulties encountered. “While UBC usually encourages on-campus research, it is also responsible for protecting its students, which makes gathering data more challenging.”

Additionally, the team mentions that data analysis, not only data collection, also represented a challenge.

“There is still a lot to be learned on how we use different types of data at different scales, so now we have been working on bringing these datasets together to inform our understanding,” Angela explained.

The project will have important implications for how we manage urban forest systems, but also for our understanding of how humans use them and move around cities. This is especially important for urban forest managers, primarily municipalities, who usually have limited resources. “Using tools like drones or distributed sensors can help them collect more detailed data around aspects like tree health, which is increasingly important as we move into a future with more climate change,” added Lorien. “It can also inform urban planning around park equity, to make sure that everyone has access to nature.”

5G data-driven natural asset management and integration represents a campus as a living lab project engaged in prototyping, meaning that it tests existing technologies in new ways. This is not only an opportunity for traditional research but also for the team to experiment with useful tools for managing healthy urban forest systems.

Learn more about the CLL Project

Data & Technology

Natural Resources

Interview: Jennifer Burns, Associate Vice-President, Information Technology & Chief Information Officer

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 06:56:20 +0000

Interview: Jennifer Burns, Associate Vice-President, Information Technology & Chief Information Officer dlopez Thu, 08/11/2022 - 23:56

Jennifer Burns, Associate Vice-President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, shares more on her role on campus including research opportunities that excite her and constraints with respect to promoting research in her operations. A resource for UBC Faculty to identify a co-lead for their project, or to identify who to contact for approvals.

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

I lead the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and UBC Information Technology (UBC IT), which is the enterprise service delivery unit. I am responsible for both strategy and service delivery across all campuses, and in all units, regardless of where that unit reports. The OCIO and its leadership team is responsible for ensuring a coherent set of policies and practices in areas that span the entire institution. For example, enterprise data governance, cybersecurity, IT governance, investment planning, and enterprise architecture. UBC IT staff provide enterprise services across UBC, such as the IT Service Centre, email, desktop services, network, WiFi, audio visual classroom support, telephones, among others. We also provide innovative services that can be found in the Emerging Media Lab and UBC Studios. A full list of UBC IT’s services can be found at it.ubc.ca.

In the CIO’s portfolio we engage with the community on a continued basis to understand what is needed to support the community. There is significant change across the University and our role is to support faculty, staff, and researchers in finding technology supports and services. We are working with individual faculty and staff as well as units to help them find solutions for their projects and initiatives.

We are also in the process of establishing the ability to undertake proofs of concept and other pre-production capabilities to support innovative projects.

What are your most urgent and pressing challenges?

The current circumstances are challenging as it has accelerated the technology needs of the institution and required many new tools and technologies on very short timelines. This means we need to be able to engage in rapid planning and delivery cycles. This type of delivery is very complementary to the Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) initiative. The idea of using the university campus as a sandbox to explore opportunities and test new ideas in our local context, with the permission to learn from our successes and failures means that we can move more quickly to find ideas and solutions that make a difference.

While the CLL initiative started with sustainability, it’s a great opportunity to extend these ideas and capabilities into other areas. As an IT function, ensuring that our colleagues across the University have access to the tools and capabilities that they need will always be a pressing concern. There is a great deal of innovation happening in all areas of the University that we need to constantly engage to understand how we might support our stakeholders goals. One area that presents a lot of opportunity and challenges will be supporting smart campus efforts. This is an area that will drive new tools and technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste, and will require IT to deploy and support new technologies. It holds a lot of promise to support sustainability initiatives and I am looking forward to finding ways to partner with these initiatives.

From a technology perspective, defending and protecting the UBC community from cyber threats continues to be a significant challenge. It’s not something the IT department or Chief Information Security Office can do on its own; it requires a community response. All of our individual actions contribute to the safety and security of UBC’s data. When planning research initiatives or other IT projects, cybersecurity must be at the forefront to ensure we are protecting UBC from current and future threats. UBC IT can help ensure that new initiatives receive appropriate assessments and approvals.

What potential research opportunities excite you the most with regard to your unit’s function?

UBC has the opportunity to support research initiatives that can be applied to UBC operations to make a difference to how the University operates. Advances in technology present tremendous opportunities for researchers to improve communities in many ways. UBC offers a unique environment to explore some of the opportunities that we can immediately connect with such as smart-cities, digital twinning, 5G, automation, and sustainability research. Supporting research across the entire institution is not always an easy undertaking, but opportunities to bring some of these novel ideas and technologies into practice at our institution and sharing in the enjoyment of the benefits they bring to everyone at UBC is particularly rewarding.

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

To support the world-class research undertaken by UBC researchers, there is a need to have continuity in IT services from the most basic and essential services such as telephony, networks, and email to some of the more unique or complex services such as high-performance computing or quantum computing. Along the way, consideration needs to be given to research data management. Often the needs of a researcher extend well beyond the services offered by any one particular group.

Some of the challenges we encounter is the specialized needs of research domains that don’t immediately match with enterprise services, requiring greater effort to find the right skills or tools. With sufficient lead time and collaborative effort, these challenges can be overcome.

IT works closely with the VPRI, the Advanced Research Computing team (ARC) and the UBC Library, as well as local IT groups to provide researchers support for tools and technologies. Ensuring that there is a comprehensive understanding of all the services available to researchers and making that information readily available is a difficult task. However, through close collaborations with the OCIO, VPRI, the Library and others, we are bridging that gap to deliver on researcher needs and to improve their ability to discover available services.

What are past research collaborations?

UBC IT is proud of its many research collaborations. Some recent examples include the Rogers 5G Smart Campus initiative, and working with Energy & Water services on WiFi Building Controls based on UBC research. Our Emerging Media Lab has also worked with many researchers on collaboration in the AR/VR space

Data & Technology

Interview: Steve Cundy, Director, UBC Advanced Research Computing

dlopez — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 06:43:39 +0000

Interview: Steve Cundy, Director, UBC Advanced Research Computing dlopez Thu, 08/11/2022 - 23:43

Steve Cundy, Director of UBC Advanced Research Computing offers insight into some of the high-performance computing platforms available to researchers at UBC and speaks to the opportunities and challenges of his work.

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

UBC Advanced Research Computing (ARC) provides institutionally-dedicated resources and support services for researchers across all disciplines working on questions that have significant or specialized data and computational needs. Working with institutional, national, regional and industry partners, we offer services and resources to empower researchers and accelerate time to discovery and innovation through the use of leading digital research infrastructure.

ARC provides training, consulting, and access to high-performance computing platforms such as Sockeye, Chinook, and RONIN to the UBC research community. Sockeye is UBC’s high-performance computing system that can enable months’ worth of work to be done in weeks or less when compared to traditional personal computers. Our object storage platform, Chinook, provides a place for research data files to be securely stored and shared – launched to meet the needs of researchers working with an ever-increasing amount of data, video, and images. Furthermore, our team of experts is available to work alongside any member of the UBC research community to evaluate what technical solutions are best suited to meet their research requirements. We also provide research data management support to researchers and offer specialized software, such as REDCap and Globus which are both secure applications for collecting, tracking, and managing research data.

What are some of the different ways that your Unit can support on-ground research on campus?

ARC provides a single point of contact for all requests relating to research computing infrastructure, platforms, and services, whether the service is provided by ARC or one of our many partners. This may include providing access to locally available digital research infrastructure and resources, consulting on privacy, security, grant proposals, and research data management, operating and supporting our institutionally dedicated HPC cluster and storage service, or facilitating onboarding to the National platforms and commercial cloud.

Additionally, we are also mandated to provide training and education to the research community. This includes hands-on workshops, online training events, and one-on-one support to ensure that researchers of all disciplines and skill levels have access to our platforms and resources throughout the course of the calendar year.

What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?

A few areas of growth in which I can foresee ARC’s participation include AI/Machine Learning platforms, cloud computing, data management platforms, web or graphical user interface to HPC clusters, and quantum computing. Currently, the expanding growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning is extremely exciting, and given that UBC is home to top leaders and innovators in the field, we are extremely well positioned to provide high-impact, comprehensive support for new innovations and discoveries.

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

With technology, there is always the constraint of maintaining existing infrastructure while simultaneously advancing in other areas. ARC proactively supports pilot projects to gain better understanding on how best to utilize certain platforms and tools to support UBC research. Another operational constraint that we face is the availability of computing infrastructure, which is very much a key component of the research we support. As both federal and our institutional computing hardware sees constant utilization, we have to be extremely resourceful and strategic when ensuring our researchers have access to the resources they need to meet publication and conference deadlines. Demand for computational power to support research has never been higher, specifically specialized processors such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We are also seeing a sharp rise in available software, platforms, and tools. Integrating and supporting fresh capabilities is always a challenge, and the sheer amount of new solutions requires us to be dynamic in our approach to delivering the research services necessary for UBC research activities.

What are your past research collaborations?

ARC is a research support unit and as such, does not collaborate directly on research projects. However, of the many different projects we have supported across the institution, from grant applications through to project closure or anything in between, here are a few examples of recent projects acknowledging the support ARC had provided:

TURJUMAN: A Public Tool for Neural Arabic Machine Translation. Visit site
Automated discovery of noncovalent inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 main protease by consensus Deep Docking of 40 billion small molecules. Visit site
Eight papers accepted from UBC Computer Vision Group by CVPR 2021. Visit site

Learn more about the CLL Project

Data & Technology

Policy, Economics & Governance