Preferred Disciplines: Computer Science focus on UI and mobile apps, post-Masters preferred
Company: Anonymous
Project Length: 1 year (2 units)
Desired start date: As soon as possible
Location: Kitchener ON, may be a split team with some in Toronto
No. of Positions: 1
Preferences: Colleges and Universities in Kitchener/Waterloo area. Strong preference for institutions without onerous IP requirements.

About the Company: 

Organization is an AI startup focused on harvesting and enriching data related to product defects for sale to corporations.

Project Description:

The aim of this assignment is investigation of methods to minimize user interaction with a mobile app while capturing as much information as possible (context is user’s situation requires they can be only minimally distracted). Proof of success is a prototype app that can capture incident information and transmit it to a data lake for downstream inspection and processing.

Research Objectives:​

• Investigation and documentation of scenarios for minimal interaction.
• Investigation and discovery of techniques to interact with users in these scenarios.
• Creation of an app that allows the techniques to be tested for user interaction and robustness of data captured.

Methodology:

The overall (multi-position) objective is to create a data lake with a visualization dashboard that can support analysis:

1. Find unique sources of data that relate to reviews of consumer products
2. Analyze these sources of data for added value and clean
3. Set up an online repository to collect these raw sources of data
4. Implement ability to tap into external APIs (e.g. weather, traffic) for additional raw data
5. Load raw sources of data into distributed database
6. Attach a visualization tool that can support dashboard analysis
7. Investigate any correlations using AI or statistical data science, e.g between location and weather at time of incident
8. Implement an emulation of a mobile app that can inject glitch data into the data lake with automatic ability to lookup external data

Challenges:

• Data might be biased for example not updating amazon reviews during a product life cycle
• Need to investigate novel sources of data that can supplement primary sources - data may not be readily available
• Sheer quantity of data available (that can be scraped) is enormous

Expertise and Skills Needed:

• An understanding of how HTTP works specifically REST architectures for API development
• Proficient in the Python programming language for API development
• Knowledge and/or experience with the micro web framework Flask a plus
• Knowledge and/or experience with React a plux
• UX expertise, particularly in unusual user contexts

For more info or to apply to this applied research position, please

1. Check your eligibility and find more information about open projects
2. ​Interested students need to get the approval from their supervisor and send their CV along with a link to their supervisor’s university webpage by applying through the webform.