Alcatel-Lucent manufactures telecommunications equipment ranging from telephone handsets to internet routers. The Research & Innovation group within Alcatel-Lucent is mandated with evaluating new technologies and new ideas that may benefit Alcatel products, thereby benefiting Alcatel-Lucent’s customers, and ultimately the end users. One current area of research is the ability to group streams of traffic into clusters, so that similar types of traffic can be treated together, and to allocate resources suitable for the stream.

Scientists believe that global warming will trigger increasingly more frequent and violent storms, heat waves, flooding, tornadoes and cyclones in some areas of the globe, while other areas will slip into cold or drought. Although the effects of climate change will impact every segment of the business community, the insurance industry is especially at risk. Extreme weather events in past years have caused tens of billions of dollars in losses for insurers.

The main focus of this internship is to define and optimize geo-spatial operations for spatial queries, coordinate transformations, routing and topological error detection and correction. The intern will define and implement spatial operators on graphs to enable efficient analysis and retrieval of geo-spatial data.

The intern’s project aims to investigate how cognitive and functional abilities of patients treated for mild/moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) change over time. Despite of neurodegenerative nature of AD, these changes might occur in every direction. According to our preliminary investigation, both improvement and worsening are possible. We will compare the long-term changes during 48 months of the follow-up and identify the probabilities of any change over a short-term (1 year) and a longer-term (4 years) follow-up.

Direct Energy is a leading retailer of energy and energy solutions for both residential and business customers in North America. In partnership with the company, the intern will work on energy data mining and analyses using gas and power data. The intern’s analyses will include analysis of natural gas storage and its impact (if any) on price momentum, the relationship between power and gas (heat-rate analysis) and some fundamental analysis such as relationships between HDD, storage gas, basis and fixed prices.

Geo-X Processing, Divestco Inc., a Canadian seismic processing contractor, is seeking to enter a new segment of the market, the so-called “depth imaging” market, by Q3 2007. The company is currently developing a comprehensive suite of depth imaging algorithms aimed at competing in the above market, but currently lacks a certain sophisticated tool. Such a tool has been recently developed at the University of Calgary, called the “FOCI algorithm”.

As computer hardware becomes more powerful, the ability to produce effects approximating physical phenomena in soft real-time for computer games becomes an achievable and important goal for game realism. Interactive smoke effects are one such phenomenon. Despite advances in game architecture, however, computing gas/fluid motion with a high degree of physical accuracy is prohibitively expensive. This project's immediate goal is to research the optimal balance of physics and aesthetics so that this particular effect can be provided to gamers in soft real-time on current hardware.

For the past 10 years, the credit derivative markets have experienced unprecedented growth. Combined with this expansion, credit risk modelling has become quite a challenging task for many financial institutions. The Royal Bank of Canada has substantial trading exposure in credit derivatives and is looking to further its modelling research and management process.

The Property and Casualty Insurance Council of Canada (PACICC) is an umbrella body which insures Canadians against the risk that their providers of car and house insurance fail. It comprises many insurance companies, both large and small. The concern is that a local disaster might force the collapse of a locally concentrated insurance company, at large cost to PACICC. Such events are rare but costly. As such, it makes sense for PACICC to join with other similar bodies (such as CDIC, CUCC, and CIDO) to share these risks.

The intern will collect data on tree mortality in the company's woodlands and develop equations to predict mortality rates from tree growth or forest age and composition. Mortality rates for white spruce have been particularly difficult to obtain due to overall low levels and sporadic occurrence of tree death. This project provides an interesting alternative broad survey approach to mortality compared to the present permanent sample plot (tag and re-measure) program. It will also aid the company with modelling the yield of mixed-wood forests.