On May 13th and 14th Centennial College participated in the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) Discovery 2019 conference held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in downtown Toronto. Discovery brings together key players from industry, academia, government, the investment community, as well as entrepreneurs and students to pursue collaboration opportunities. Discovery 2019 was attended by over 3000 attendees and over 500 exhibitors.
Centennial has attended Discovery over the years to showcase the innovative projects and ideas for collaboration with other industry players in Ontario. A conglomeration of staff and students were on hand this year from Centennial Applied Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship Services (ARIES), the School of Engineering Technology and Applied Sciences (SETAS), Wearable, Interactive and Mobile Technology Access Centre in Health (WIMTACH), and the Landing Gear project.
Jordan Wosnick, Research Innovation and Engagement Manager, organized the Centennial contingency at Discovery 2019. “The main goal there was to help maintain and build our network” says Wosnick. "People came by the booth to look at the WIMTACH partner demos and asked about what we do and some just came to chat with some of our staff that were in their network.” Wosnick sees the opportunities that OCE Discovery provides and the value gained by Centennial’s presence at the conference. “Overall, this is mostly about awareness and a little bit about partnership-building”
Unique this year was a second booth featuring Centennial College hosted by members of the Centennial College Aerospace team featuring Eric Blaise, Director of Applied Research and Innovation, and Sandra Munoz-Ortegon, Project Coordinator accompanied by Centennial students working on Aerospace projects. At this booth, Centennial was joined by Safran Landing Systems, one of the partners on the Landing Gear project. “There was a big aerospace focus on this year’s show” says Blaise. “We shared a booth with Safran Landing Systems, who brought a physical landing gear with them that drew a lot of interest. We had a screen showcasing videos explaining what we were doing on landing gear electrification and on additive manufacturing.”
The event was also a great learning experience for the student researchers who were taking part in the event for the first time. Students at the aerospace booth presented their work and answered questions about their projects. “It was a great learning experience for them to learn how to communicate with those outside of their specific industry and develop their pitch skills to explain their projects” says Blaise.
The WIMTACH contingent featured Purnima Tyagi, WIMTACH Director, and Jeziel Vidad, WIMTACH manager accompanied by their student research team. WIMTACH demonstrated a project involving image processing that uses an application to ease the process in gaining custom clip-ons for glasses. Student researcher Oleksandr Palchevskyi explains “You used to have to ship your glasses to the optician who would measure the glasses to determine the correct clip-ons. With this frame and the markings, a camera on a phone could take a photo from the top and align with the markings on the frame to have an image without any distortion that you could then send to an optician to expedite the process.” The goal is to develop the app for opticians to utilize this app in the future when developing custom clip-ons.
Centennial College had a strong presence at OCE Discovery with groups from all facets of innovation from the college represented. The conversations and potential partnerships yield promise for the future and provide a glimpse at where the college can go from an innovation perspective.