Like many LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community organizations, Reelout Arts Project Inc.
provides resources to people who experience social or geographic isolation – particularly through their
annual film festival and community film library. For these resources to reach broad audiences, however, they
must be able to connect with those who are searching for relevant material. The success of search results
has much to do with the organization of information online: the ways in which resources are described,
compiled, and presented to users.

The Thingery Sharing Inc. is the logistics provider and parent organization of five co-operatively owned community-level goods lending libraries known as Thingeries located throughout the Lower Mainland of BC. As a data-intensive enterprise, Thingery Sharing Inc. has the potential to track the social and ecological impacts of community level goods sharing. However, the existing literature provides insufficient guidance on how to structure indicators of social impact in the newly emerging sharing economy.

Using an advanced social media analysis tool developed by experts at Nexalogy, we will look at a Twitter campaign that focuses on gender-identity and inequality in an effort to challenge and change unequal representation of marginalized people (in this case, gender) in elected office and spaces of traditional political power.

Since the 19th century, Chinese men and women have migrated to small towns and cities throughout places such as Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America in search of better opportunities, bringing with them many traditional cultural practices, values and customs that evolved over time and space. How did early migrants retain cultural heritage practices? How did people adapt their cultural traditions to local environments? What systems were in place to support the continuation of these practices, and how have these systems evolved over the past century?

Pelmorex (owner of the brands The Weather Network and MeteoMedia) operates weather information services accessed by all Canadians on desktop computers, mobile apps and television. The mobile app is one of the most downloaded and used apps in the country, within both the Apple/Google ecosystems of smart phones/tablets. Continuous and accurate location data is collected from the apps in a privacy safe way, adhering to Canadian privacy commissioner guidelines and standards such as Pipeda, with no PII (personally identifiable information) being collected.

PUBLIC is an innovative print periodical with a 25 year history exploring the intersection between art, design, technology and contemporary culture. This Mitacs fellowship will develop the journal’s open access interactive web platform, PUBLIC:PORTAL, using information visualization and design to showcase the journal’s cutting-edge collaborative and cross-disciplinary work. This project designs and tests graphical user interfaces and information visualization strategies in order to investigate the ways that abstract and complex information can be conveyed through intuitive design.

With rapidly improving display technologies used in the home, cinema needs to remain competitive in terms of achieving the highest image quality on screen. While increasing the quantity of pixels is currently rolled out, so far nothing has been proposed to improve the quality of those pixels. Emerging prototype cinema displays are currently being show-cased which brings significant improvement over traditional cinema experience. However new display technology with different pixel quality require modification to the traditional cinema workflow.

Romantic relationships play a key role in happiness but keeping the spark alive over time in relationships is challenging. One route to maintaining passion and desire is to engage in self-expanding activities with a partner. Although novel, self-expanding experiences tend to promote desire and passion, introducing novelty into a relationship can be intimidating. In a recent study, we found that individuals who were asked to engage in exciting sexual activities over the course of two-weeks reported greater passion and sexual desire, though there was no influence on intimacy.

The objective of the project is to design a system that is able to generate context-wise reasonable and meaningful responses to open-domain conversation queries. In open-domain conversation generation, the retrieval-based methods and neural network generative models are two main approaches; there are also some recent research about improving the context consistency of conversation generation.

This project will investigate the creation of an accessible digital platform that will serve as the basis for all future publications of PUBLIC as well as a model for similar organizations looking to make the transition from print to digital. Importnatly, this project centers dis/ability communities, methods, and methodologies. Not only will this research situate PUBLIC and Public Access as a leader in digital publishing, but they will be providing access to a larger audience and be better equipped to work with dis/ability communities in the organization’s operations.