Industrial minerals are an important part of the economy in British Columbia, however, this sector faces several serious challenges due to lack of a national instrument for industrial minerals. “National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101)” is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and administered by the provincial securities commissions that govern how issuers disclose scientific and technical information about their mineral projects to the public. It covers oral statements as well as written documents and websites.

Point Grey Research Inc. is a worldwide leader in the development of advanced digital camera technology products. Point Grey designs, manufactures and distributes IEEE-1394 (FireWire) cameras, stereo vision cameras and spherical digital video cameras to a broad spectrum of industries. To take fully advantage of the advanced digital camera technology and reduce the extra cost in data transmission between cameras and servers, it is preferred that most image processing tasks could be done on-camera.

General Fusion is currently working to develop a relatively small, low-cost fusion reactor; work has reached the proof-of-concept stage. The reactor consists of an enclosure filled with molten lead, spun about one axis to create a plasma-filled cavity. A mechanically-induced shock wave travels radially inwards, focusing as it propagates and collapses the plasma cavity. This collapse heats and pressurizes the plasma and initiates a fusion reaction that releases energy, re-expanding the cavity and causing another shock to propagate radially outwards through the lead.

The intern will be completing experimental work on compost-based stormwater filters. The experiments will provide necessary data for the development of a predictive mathematical model that will be used to predict the service and maintenance schedule of a compost-based stormwater filter. Specifically, the intern will be collecting data for the dissolved metal uptake capacity of the compost, determining how fast the metals are uptaken, and finally, constructing and gathering data from a pilot site at the University of British Columbia.

CanGEA - the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association - is a non-profit association encouraging research, exploration and development of high temperature geothermal energy resources in Canada. Geothermal energy is a renewable, reliable source of electricity and heat. Geothermal power sources produce long term revenues with no fuel costs and no emissions. Thus, the purpose of this project is to investigate the possibility of generating environmentally-friendly electricity from abandoned gas and oil wells in the Canadian Foothills in eastern BC.

The detection of a power circuit breaker's operation through measuring electromagnetic emissions produced by the arc in the interruptor tube is a promising method for ensuring the remote supervision of these devices and for identifying operation faults before they lead to an explosion. Project researchers will develop an algorithm to determine computationally the position of the faulty interruptor tube. This algorithm will use as inputs a minimal number of measure points and will have to deduce the position based on the signals' arrival times at each of the measure points.

The intern will develop a new space-time finite element formulation to solve steady state problems involving high temperature superconductors in order to evaluate rapidly the losses in a given application. This space-time formulation will also be coupled to a mesh adaption program used to refine the solution only where it is really necessary. This formulation is expected to be advantageous over current formulation since it will avoid using very fine spatial and geometric discretization in the entire simulated domain.

This project in collaboration with Lockheed Martin Canada and University Laval is on aerial surveillance. The goal is to develop and implement algorithms for the automatic object detection using electro-optics data to be used in conjunction with standard operation with the aim of enhancing the speed and accuracy of the regular detection of objects from aerial images. The challenge is to recognize 3D objects in real-world 2D imagery.

Nokia is interested in research of both in-body (implanted) antennas and antennas in close proximity to the human body. Nokia is particularly interested in making positive use of the electromagnetic coupling between the antenna and the human body, know as positive body effects. The internship research will focus on fundamental antennas, electric and magnetic dipoles in lossy matter, with a goal to show, quantitatively, that the magnetic dipole is better suited to implanted applications.

The content delivery network market is undergoing rapid growth as a broadband penetration develops and the demand for Internet delivery of high-quality media increases. To facilitate the planning phase of Video-on-Demand (VoD) networks, in collaboration with Nortel Networks, we developed the VoD Equipment Alocation Tool.