The first year study of the Canadian Diaspora Project (2008-2010) finds that overseas Canadians are important assets for global Canada, specifically in their contribution to Canada's foreign relations with their country of residence. This research continues the Canadian Diaspora Project and further explores ways to foster the political, economic and cultural links of these overseas Canadians to their homeland, especially through the Canadian diasporic media available in their country of residence.

Environment-friendly, renewable energy sources are required to meet the world's ever increasing energy demands. While conventional silicon-based photovoltaic solar cells provide an attractive alternative to fossil fuel based energy sources, their inherent high cost has limited their use. The optical rectenna solar cell (ORSC) represents a potential high efficiency, non-silicon based, economic alternative. This internship aims to investigate the design and fabrication of ORSC devices.

British Columbia's coastline is home to eighteen species of cetaceans and three species of sea turtles. Nine of these are at risk of extinction. To conserve these species, it is crucial to learn more about their distribution/abundance and habitat use. The British Columbia Cetacean Sightings Network (BCCSN) was established to gather sightings of these species from a network of mariners and coastal citizens. Since then, the BCCSN has received thousands of sightings from hundreds of observers up and down the coast.

The objective of this research is to propose and implement a set of new methodologies to create a 3D hazard map that includes models of structures and obstacles in the airport area. The project uses multiple oblique and nadir views high resolution aerial imageries (pictometery images) to reconstruct such models. Various views of an obstacle are combined using image processing and computer vision algorithms to create an accurate 3D wireframe model of the obstacle. The building blocks of the project include two sub‐systems.

The average person manages uncertainty on a daily basis, from determining whether to invest in a particular stock to predicting the outcome of a baseball game. However, in some cases, such as that of Boeing safety analysis, the consequences can be much larger. When people’s lives are at stake, effective tools to manage and communicate uncertainty to decision makers are essential. Before being able to visually represent uncertainty effectively, there is a need for understanding where it fits in the analytic process and current methods of visualization.

The Katzie First Nation is working towards establishing a Community Forest Agreement (CFA) with the Province of British Columbia. The area of intent lies within Katzie Traditional Territory and includes Blue Mountain and Douglas Provincial Forests, located along the east banks of Alouette Lake. To establish a CFA, the Katzie desire a holistic approach to forest planning that not only considers timber harvesting, but also non‐timber economic opportunities, traditional use values, multiple stakeholder desires and prospects for cultural preservation and education.

The focus of this project is to investigate the possibility of applying data mining techniques to answer high level design questions specific to the development of high quality multi©player first person shooter games. The industrial partner, Threewave Software, works on game development of multiplayer first person shooters. The company has developed a technology that enables the real©time instrumentation and storage of game play data and is hoping to use basic data analysis techniques to answer high level design questions. Examples of such questions are:

This internship proposes an abstract model, based on a local of the node where the users are located, instead of a global navigable map. This model is concerned about satisfying users’ transactional need to compare modes of transportation and the costs and outcome of each mode, rather than understanding contextual information about each POI (location). The research team proposes a model that is similar to the way ants find navigation routes. Study shows that ants follow routes that other ants follow.

This project is a continuation of last year’s project in which a backend system was design to calculate Fit Brains fitness index that is a way by which Fit Brains can assess clients’ progress. Now that the system has been designed it needs to be implemented, that is each game and database has to be assigned all appropriate description so client’s gaming patterns can be tracked. In addition we will examine if it is possible to find out what exactly makes some of Fit Brains game more popular than others.

The throughput of next-gen sequencers is about 20 to 90 million base pairs per hour and increasing. To map this huge volume of data to reference genome and reduce the computation time, current mapping tools are installed on the clusters. Although using a cluster reduces the computation time but the cost of having such a cluster is considerable. So, there is a trade-off between computation time and computation cost. This project’s goal is to reduce the computation time as well as to reduce the computation cost.