The overall objective for this project is to support the research of one master’s student who will help advance the research related to the social discourse of sustainable transportation and climate policy in Canada. In this field, START, in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at SFU, is one of the leading research teams in the country and Navius Research Incorporated is the leading Canadian consulting firm, providing support to governments and other stakeholders in the development and assessment of climate policy.

D-Wave’s quantum computer is good at solving a specific type of problems known as Ising spin problems. However, in order to solve one of these spin problems, you must first solve another hard problem—embedding the spin problem on D-Wave’s quantum processor.
From the land of discrete mathematics, this embedding problem falls into a well studied branch of graph theory known as graph minors. Being that this problem is difficult in and of itself, D-Wave has developed a heuristic solution. This project’s main aim is to help improve this embedding process.

The project will evaluate the Community Scholars Program (CSP) to promote program sustainability, growth and further development. The CSP provides free research database access for 500 community organizations in British Columbia and is a partnership between United Way of the Lower Mainland, Mindset Social Innovation Foundation, and the SFU Library. Now in its second phase, the program was created in 2016 to address the problem of access to research outside of the academic community.

This project will explore the ways that businesses communicate internally, with their employees and other stakeholders. In order to determine what the current best practices are in terms of how to communication to employees, through which platforms or media, or using specific strategies, the intern will conduct a thorough review of academic and ‘grey’ literature (not quite academic and not quite popular, for example, business magazines). The intern will compile a report for the partner organization in order to help with their own internal communication best practices and product development.

Computational thinking is a recent and very popular addition to elementary school curricula. Computational thinking projects students undertake include five basic parts: identifying key features of a problem (decomposing), creating a model of relationships among factors (modeling) in a causal system or data, designing steps (algorithm) to solve the problem or analyze data, trying out and repairing missteps (debugging), and generalizing findings.

The number and size of commercial ships transporting goods to and from ports in the Salish Sea continues to grow. Additionally, there are considerable industrial developments being planned in the region, including a major port expansion, and an oil pipeline terminal under consideration. These trends suggest more ship traffic, and with this comes an increase to cetaceans in the risk these vessels pose for collisions.

The project is to develop a middleware system for improving drinking water management system. The middleware integrates multiple data sources in addition to the real-time network data, including information of weather from satellite/ radar and water quality of surface water from remote sensing and then analyze them. It's smart algorithms will predict and prioritizes events depending on the severity of the problem.

As shared micromobility services (e.g., e-bikes, public bike shares, e-scooters) expand, there are uncertainties in how these will integrate with our current transportation systems. This project aims to examine public perceptions of micromobility in Metro Vancouver to understand the potential for shared micromobility in the region. Using surveys, focus groups, and case studies we ask: Who are the potential users of shared micromobility? What are the barriers and facilitators for use of micromobility? What is the potential for integration with transit services?

D-Wave systems purports to have designed a quantum processor based on scalable architecture that physically implements quantum annealing, an algorithm that can be used to solve a wide variety of optimization problems. In order for D-Wave devices to exhibit a performance advantage over classical processors, it is necessary that the devices utilize a resource that is inaccessible to any classical algorithm. This resource is generally associated with quantum entanglement.

The proposed project will establish an echo-system consisting of various environmental sensors and actuators and how they can be integrated to build a prototype indoor garden for demonstration purposes. Through utilizing IoT-enabled sensory data from image and environmental sensors, one can obtain relevant information about plant growth in real-time or use the data for a posteriori analysis. The large number of generated data will be used to create mathematical signatures that can be used for a variety of applications such as detecting anomalies in the growth process.