Innovative Projects Realized

Empathic Conversational AI Agent for pain understanding and management

Currently in Canada, 8 out of 10 Canadians have ongoing musculoskeletal pain preventing from doing regular day to day activity, and looking for solutions for their pain. The proposed research is aimed to create a conversational chatbot that can engage in empathetic conversation to examine the effect of empathic conversation in engagement and pain management in users, by evoking self reflection and self-awareness in the user. With the empathetic technology developed, not only will Canadians be able to be guided through their pain to find the best solutions for them, they will be guided by this warm artificial intelligence that can make sense of what they say and is truly attuned to their pain.

Community Care Program Liaison

We are looking for a student or recent graduate to assist us with the transition of expanding our service range for community care. By participating in this internship, a wider audience will be reached about what services we offer. The intern will be able to help expand our company reach that was limited due to Crossroad’s small staff team that has limited internal resources to grow. By building community engagement through connections in the community, and execute and refine a referral process, tasks would include making connections in the community, working with and matching referrals more efficiently to our tailored services, updating and providing presentations of our services, and collaborating with our marketing team to ensure seamless support of the community engagement strategy. An intern from a reputable bachelor of business administration program will bring the necessary skillset and bandwidth to help the organization to enhance its capabilities.

Segmentation des profils de jeu des hockeyeurs à partir de données publiques ou commerciales

Le projet vise à utiliser des données décrivant les événements d’une partie de hockey et leur localisation sur la patinoire afin de segmenter les types de joueurs. Les données relatives au profil physique des joueurs de hockey (données passives) ont été historiquement employées afin de guider la fabrication des pièces d’équipement au hockey. Pour ce projet, le partenaire souhaite employer une perspective différente et veut baser l’identification de potentiels nouveaux segments de joueurs professionnels à partir des différentes phases de jeu (données actives), de manière à lier plus finement la pièce d’équipement à son utilisation au cours d’une partie. Avec cette masse de données et le traitement de ces dernières, le partenaire pourra mieux comprendre ledit lien entre les actions des joueurs et l’équipement utilisé, ce qui aidera par la suite à mieux servir ces segments.
ainsi concevoir des équipements de haute performance personnalisés qui peuvent s’adapter à tous les profils éventuellement identifiés. Cette méthodologie innovante pourra aussi être exploitée afin de concevoir d’autres pièces d’équipement.

Les accords externes de l’Union européenne en matière de migration

Dans le cadre de ce séjour au Canada, je souhaite pouvoir confronter mon projet de recherche centré sur l’Union européenne, au modèle migratoire canadien et québécois. Cette confrontation pourra nourrir ma réflexion et me permet d’avoir une connaissance de certains modèles alternatifs.
Le projet de recherche vise la détermination des responsabilités et de l’imputabilité des fautes commises en application d’accords non-conventionnels dans le cadre de la politique européenne de migration. Cette analyse se basera sur une étude du phénomène d’externalisation du contrôle des migrations. Cette externalisation repose sur un accroissement des compétences de l’agence Frontex (en charge du contrôle des frontières extérieures de l’Union). En outre, l’Union cherche à responsabiliser davantage les pays d’origine et de départ des migrants, tout en délocalisant le contrôle et la gestion des migrants dans les États du Sud de l’Europe et dans les États insulaires.
Le Canada, en développant une politique migratoire spécifique, me permet de recueillir les critiques internationales à l’encontre du modèle européen. Ces critiques participent à l’enrichissement de mes travaux présents et futurs.

Shear Strength Mechanisms in Prestressed Concrete

Preliminary data analysis has indicated that many prestressed concrete elements have experimentally determined shear strengths which are substantially higher than the shear strengths predicted by the related provisions in the Canadian concrete design code. While these results represent no risk to public safety, actual strengths which are significantly higher than predicted strengths result in considerably higher construction costs, longer building completion times, and severe limitations on the types of allowable structural systems. These negative consequences can lead to undesirable carbon dioxide emissions, higher taxes, increased housing prices, longer periods with elevated noise levels, extended road or lane closures, as well as limiting potential for artistic ingenuity. In this research project, clauses, equations, and/or requirements in the Canadian concrete design code associated with inaccurate shear capacity predictions of prestressed concrete elements will be identified. Potential amendments to the current shear strength requirements in the Canadian concrete design code will also be developed which will improve the shear strength prediction accuracy.

Understanding the policies & procedures that foster achievement of gender parity in Canadian local governments

Women’s political representation is one of the pillars of democracy and the UN goal towards gender equality. Recently, there have been conducted many studies about gender equity at the federal and provincial levels, but very little at the municipal level. This research project will begin to fill this gap by examining how a few municipal governments in Canada have managed to achieve gender parity. The intern will collect and analyze documents of five municipalities that succeeded in reaching gender parity. Also, the intern will conduct interviews with municipal officials to learn more about their perspectives on this topic. The partner organization, FCM, is looking forward to providing the research findings to their members, Canadian municipalities. FCM expects that practical examples and insights of what policies may be helpful for fostering gender parity will enable more Canadian municipalities to implement them and increase women’s political representation.

La collaboration à distance chez Hydro Québec

Ce stage de recherche vise le développement et le transfert de connaissances dans les domaines de la gestion de projets d’innovation complexes et la collaboration intraorganisationnelle à distance. Plus spécifiquement, le stage permettra d’appuyer une société d’État québécoise dans son processus de décision visant à évaluer et sélectionner des mécanismes de collaboration à distance dans le cadre de ses projets de centrales La Romaine. Le contexte particulier de l’organisation représente une opportunité unique pour le stagiaire d’observer et d’agir sur une situation caractérisée par des concepts théoriques qu’il maîtrise (innovation, collaboration intra organisationnelle et gestion de projet complexe). Pour les gestionnaires de l’organisation, le stage constitue une façon de s’approprier des connaissances pertinentes et de les mettre en action dans un cadre qui facilite les interactions entre les partenaires. En somme, ce stage permet d’établir un pont théoriepratique pour le bénéfice des deux parties.

Investigating the efficacy of an injectable bacterin vaccine in reducing bacterial pneumonia in pre-weaned lambs and feedlot lambs

This study will investigate the ability of an injectable vaccine to reduce illness and death due to pneumonia in lambs born and raised in a feedlot setting. If the vaccine is effective, it will improve the welfare of the lambs on the farm where the study is conducted, reduce antibiotic usage and costs, and improve profitability for the company that owns the farm. If proven to be effective the study will help to justify the use of this vaccine beyond this population (i.e. other Alberta and Canadian farms) and help to support the use of respiratory vaccines for the livestock industry in general.

Emotion AI Analytics for e-Commerce Websites

Development and execution of business development strategy to commercialize an innovative and non-intrusive emotion AI tech that uses gestures to sense emotions on websites.

Programming Efficiencies into Integrated Communications at Bannikin Travel and Tourism

The project will entail researching, and developing an integrated communications program with and for Bannikin Travel and Tourism that incorporates new technologies and/or processes, leverages organizational expertise and experience, aligns with current market trends, and responds to the needs of the company’s clients. This will result in an enhanced and more innovative stream of business for the company while freeing up capacity to take on more business; growing Bannikin and their ability to help clients in a struggling industry across the globe.

Blue Economy Assessment Framework for Atlantic Canada

The Blue Economy is the proposed sustainable version of the regular ocean economy, with tremendous amounts of funding being provided by provincial and federal government agencies to support the industry. Supported research shows that there are challenges with recruiting youth to the industry, especially underrepresented youth and geographically underrepresented youth. The lack of framework and criteria to determine which organizations and industries could be considered sustainable enough to be in the Blue Economy is a contributing challenge. The Students on Ice (SOI) Foundation, as the lead on a larger initiative under the Ocean Supercluster called Blue Futures Pathways, aims to support the knowledge mobilization of research within the Sustainable Blue Economy and to engage youth aged 14-30, with career paths, and relevant topics related to careers in this sub-sector of the Sustainable Blue Economy. In the development of a blue economy assessment framework, this collaboration will help SOI build a network of organizations that meet the criteria for the sustainable blue economy so that they may successfully connect youth to career opportunities in the SBE.

Mercator AI – Project Fit Innovation

Scope of work: Develop and implement data science models to identify construction projects relevant to our clients, before they go up for bid. Apply machine learning algorithms to public and proprietary datasets to recommend contract opportunities at as early stage as possible in the building process. Develop and implement logic to be applied to this problem in a technology startup environment.

Duties: Work with front end, and back end software developers, solutions architects, data engineers, and other data scientists to develop recommendation systems from public and private data sets. Meet with clients to determine needs, provide a functional decomposition of the problem set. Use the functional decomposition to assign work tasks and priority to actionable metrics.

Skill Set: Experience with developing and implementing machine learning models in python. Data science certificate, and/or MSc in Engineering or related field. Experience with product management and deconstructing client needs into actionable items an asset.