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.

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.

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 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.

This project will investigate the relative financial benefit of adding different types of power generating resources to the BC Hydro energy portfolio over time. The analysis will consider various drivers of financial risk that influence this evaluation such as commodity prices, energy demand, and water inflows. Appropriate measures of risk will be considered to aid in evaluating the comparison of alternate resource additions. A spreadsheet model will be constructed to complete the analysis.

Aurel Systems Inc. offers a commercial dynamic process simulation program called CADSIM Plus™ (www.aurelsystems.com). At several places in the program sets of nonlinear equations must be solved or nonlinear functions must be minimized (for example, solving pressure flow networks, solving for independent variables given sets of user defined dependent variables, solving for both temperatures on a heat exchanger with condensation or flash).

This research project is part of a research study funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care in Ontario. It examines the relationship among nursing service utilization, patient outcomes and population health care needs in long-term care/chronic care and community care/home care sectors in Ontario. It seeks to provide a needs-based Health Human Resources Planning approach to help policy makers in developing human resource strategies that target the nursing shortage and respond to the changing needs of the population over time.

Semiconductor materials are essential for today’s fast growing electro-optic and computer industries and semiconductor crystal growth is a key stage in the manufacturing process. There is constant market pressure to increase the size and quality of crystals so that more and better devices can be put on a single wafer. The most widely used crystal growth technique is the Czochralski (Cz) method, in which a semiconductor crystal is grown at the tip of a seed-crystal while the seed is slowly extracted from a pool of molten material.