Risk and portfolio management models arising in finance can be formulated and solved as optimization problems. Credit risk models are especially challenging for practical implementation due to the fact that the portfolio’s loss distribution is not known exactly. To solve such problems, special mathematical, algorithmic and implementation techniques are required. This internship project with Algorithmics Inc., a financial risk management software provider, plans to investigate solving credit risk optimization models using modern optimization algorithms.

Increasingly, global business relies on the exchange of information between web services. It is crucial that these services correctly exchange messages. A computer science student from the University of Toronto will work with IBM at their Toronto Centre for Advanced Studies on a research tool that monitors "conversations" between web services to ensure that the sets of messages exchanged are correct. The project will study the possibility of extending this tool to check security and data-dependant properties of these conversations.

The desire to offer on-demand, 24/7 services means there is pressure to quickly identify and resolve problems in a database management system (DBMS). Problem determination tools rely on the existence of sufficient monitoring data to support analysis but monitoring introduces overhead and so causes decreased application performance. The proposed research seeks to provide effective light-weight tools for monitoring and analysis to support problem determination in DBMSs.

In “shared control” of a machine, a user works cooperatively with an intelligent system to continuously direct or steer the machine’s operation. In this project with Spark Robotics Technology Inc., a provider of products and services for the defense and security industry, the research team will apply this concept to the problem of navigating or searching information streams.

This project with Koolhaus Games, an electronic game developer, aims to use state-of-the-art natural language processing technology as part of a novel and innovative social networking and social gaming engine. Social networking games are popular, particularly among children, and the team hopes to use natural language processing technology to provide a transparent, multi-lingual interface for communication between children from various countries who speak different languages.

There are certain features of skin lesions or moles that are indicative of cancer. Texture (spatial variation of colour/intensity) or patterns is known to be one of these features. This research seeks to quantify this textural information in order to improve the performance of methods to automatically diagnose melanoma. Currently, dermatologists are very proficient at interpreting this textural information, and easily outperform automated techniques.

Motion Capture (mocap) is a very powerful technology that allows one to digitize natural motion and use it in many areas. Currently, mocap is expensive and intrusive. The core of this project is to develop a pipeline for semi-automatic extraction of 3D motion data from ordinary video sequences. Besides being able to avoid many of the expensive and time consuming aspects of traditional motion capture, the intern will be able to extract motion data in a non-intrusive fashion from readily obtainable video data.

This internship is the first in a series of four which Kinexus is undertaking with ACCELERATE BC which will support its overall ambitious goal of creating high resolution maps of internal cell communication networks that are gender, age, tissue and disease-specific. These maps will be needed for identifying disease diagnostic biomarkers that are phospho-sites and drug targets that are kinases. The dividends of these efforts will be improved diagnostics and therapeutics for personalized medicine delivery.

This project will explore the pedagogical usefulness of a visual programming tool developed by Business Objects, called Gem Cutter. It will be used to illustrate and teach computer programming concepts to new students. This is different from the traditional text-based model in which students are required to engage in text-based interactions with a computer as they develop programs. The text-based model tends to be difficult for new students to grasp and often discourages them in early stages of learning.

Automated Systems Research (ASR) has been supplying software to the roofing estimation market for close to 20 years. While the lack of competition in this niche market has provided for a steady ongoing business opportunity, it has created a vacuum of research in this area. One of the recurring research problems at ASR is that of generating the entire surface of a sloped roof given the building’s polygonal outline and also the roof slope angle at each outline edge.