The generalization of the paper maché-like technique of covering surfaces with strips to industrial applications like building shells and ship hulls has not been fully realized. In participate, the problem of covering any curved surface with strips of material has been addressed but not solved in the general case. Most of the applicable research focuses either on using parameterizations that inevitably introduce cutting and/or stretching or using developable surfaces rather than strips.

The interns will conduct marketing research to design, develop and deliver an integrated marketing plan for two new cancer detection products, called LungSign™ and OralAdvance™. Each intern will conduct a competitive analysis using visual tools in order to identify underutilized market opportunities. Based on the analysis, the interns will deliver recommendations for a marketing mix and communications plan and design a creative strategy for increased use of these early detection products.

Miniaturization and microintegration is well known for their potentials in providing microsystems and sensors with unmatched performance, reliability, and lower costs. Current technologies in implementation of microsensors, however, span a large variety of platforms. It is thus common for microsensors measuring differing parameters to exist on different combinations of substrates, not to even mention the associated signal conditioning, processing, and data communication electronics.

The aim of the current project is to research ways of dynamically “crawling” the Internet to collect enough information to be able to make a confident conclusion of whether a particular wep-page or blog is spam. This is proposed to be done by continually maintaining a `backbone' subset of the set of all web pages containing the pinging blogs and trusted websites, and doing a minor crawl based on the web page that is to be analyzed.

The goal of this research is to define an information acquisition strategy for use in the definition and development of visual analytics (VA) tools relevant to the domain of interest. The strategy will account for task and job requirements gathering and incorporate a wealth of human factors issues known to be important in critical system design, e.g., workload, situation awareness, automation, etc. Another goal is to provide valid information for the design of laboratory and field studies using existing or new VA tools or components as the study apparatus.

The main component of this project with MapleSoft, Inc., a software development and business consulting firm, will be to design a high performance implementation (in C) of a set of procedures the intern has created in Maple language. These procedures provide an environment for doing polynomial arithmetic in a ‘lazy’ way. That is, they allow the team to compute in a way where polynomial algebra is done only when absolutely necessary. Computing in this fashion will allow the researchers to approach the implementation of several computer algebra algorithms in a novel way.

The proposed research project will assess psychiatric patients shortly before hospital discharge and then conduct follow-up assessments once a month in the community for three months. Assessment will include data collected from interviews as well as file reviews and will focus on the effect of patient perceptions on therapeutic and adverse outcomes.

Forest fire risk modeling is a new and rapidly developing approach to managing the threat of wildfire to British Columbia communities. The demand for forest fire risk assessment technology is growing rapidly in British Columbia due to the increasing number and extent of forest fires as well as the rapid expansion of residential housing in rural areas. The Gulf Islands National Park Reserve Fire Risk Assessment Project is developing a model that will identify the areas where fires are most likely to start and most likely to cause damage (both to endangered ecosystems and to human values).

One of the primary reasons for this regionalization of health care in British Columbia is so that more resources can be spent on direct patient care and less on bureaucracy and duplication. A critical component of this systems approach is equipping selected facilities with the resources to treat the most severely injured patients. Distance to care is hypothesized to be inversely related to patient outcome – as delays in transporting patients to critical care has a known negative effect on mortality and morbidity.

British Columbia’s coastline is home to eighteen species of cetaceans (such as whales, dolphins and porpoises) and three species of sea turtles. Nine of these species are at risk of extinction. To conserve them, it is crucial to learn more about their distribution/abundance and habitat use. The British Columbia Cetaceans 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.