Innovative Projects Realized

1 Million Teachers Internship – Business Strategy

According to UNESCO, the global teacher shortage will reach 69 million by the year 2030. 1 Million Teachers (1MT) is a social enterprise offering blended learning experiences designed to train new teachers, provide ongoing professional development, and attract new teachers to the profession. 1MT aims to close the

gap in the supply of competent teachers by not only attracting new teachers into the profession and training both the new and old but also, by motivating them to keep improving their performance. This is done through a comprehensive reward-based development program that combines high quality online and classroom-based training with mentorship on a scale never attempted before – ensuring that teachers and school administrators become lifelong learners.

Currently, 1MT’s e-learning content focuses on teachers in the Global South with a concentration on Sub Saharan Africa with the goal to expand in other regions too. The courses are designed to be highly accessible, requires low bandwidth for end users on mobile devices, and is delivered on 1MT’s learning platform: start.1millionteachers.com. These e-learning courses are created according to the traditional ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implement, Evaluation) Model of instructional design.

Lifelong reinforcement learning with autonomous inference of subtask dependencies

In this project, we propose a continual learning approach to face the problem of forward transfer in complex reinforcement learning tasks. Concretely, we propose a model that learns how to combine a series of general modules in a deep learning architecture, so that generalization emerges through the composition of those modules. This is of vital importance for Element AI to provide reusable solutions that scale with new data, without the need of learning a new model for every problem and improving the overall performance.

Recovery of culturally important forest plant communities after wildfire in interior British Columbia

In collaboration with the Nadleh Whut’en and Stellat’en First Nations and SERNbc, researchers from university of Northern British Columbia will look at the response of vegetation communities to fire disturbance in the Northern interior of BC. We hope to determine if burn severity alters expected recovery rates and richness of vegetation. We hope to accurately document plant stress in three plants of cultural importance, and note if changes in soils affect plant health and ability to regenerate for food and medicinal use. We will provide recommendations for what will be required to move forward with remediation of the burned land, including information on how soils may need to be tended, which plants and stores of seed are most highly impacted, and predict how plant communities in the burned area will recover.

Vaolo – Priorisation de contenu dans un fil continu

Vaolo est la plateforme de l’organisation non gouvernementale à but non lucratif (ONG) Village Monde. Il s’agit d’une plateforme technologique innovante dans le secteur du voyage, au croisement entre les plateformes transactionnelles, collaboratives, les réseaux sociaux et le partage.
Par son positionnement unique la plateforme Vaolo est appelée à accumuler d’importantes quantités de données avec une croissance soutenue issues de nos différents acteurs : explorateurs, voyageurs, acteurs locaux, agences, partenaires de contenu et de commercialisation.
Un des enjeux principaux de ce type de service est de constamment proposer le meilleur contenu possible aux bons utilisateurs. Pour ce faire, l’un des outils principaux de la plateforme Vaolo est son fil de contenu qui permet, un peu à la mode Pinterest, de dérouler du contenu à volonté, tel un fil social. La priorisation du contenu présenté est présentement effectuée selon certains critères fixes non-variables.
Le but de ce stage est de concevoir, entraîner et déployer un outil d’intelligence artificielle permettant de prioriser et personnaliser la proposition de contenu. Ce fil de contenu s’adaptera donc selon certains facteurs en temps réel, et sera personnalisé à chaque usager et à son contexte.

Regionalization Project Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador with the support of the Professional Municipal Administrators Association

This project is based upon an applied research approach and using a business analytics lens, it seeks to understand the state of the municipal sector to date in Newfoundland and Labrador with respect to regional service and resource sharing. It focuses on regionalization and identifies the current and best practice models for regionalization and regional government in Canada and elsewhere.

PredictNow.ai Business Internship

I will be helping PredictNow.ai grow thier business by working in a marketing/sales role. As recently formed startup PredictNow.ai is still in the process of establishing thier digital footprint from a marketing perpective, which I will help grow. Additionally I will help answer customer questions and help communicate the technical end of the product to clients. I will also help PredictNow.ai grow it’s customer base it has acquired since thier launch. Outside of these tasks, I will also pickup any work I can to help the management team.

Marketing Plan Research Assistance

This research project gives business students an opportunity to get in touch with the real world and apply the knowledge they studied to help solve business problems. Students need to integrate their knowledge in Marketing, Finance and Information Technologies to help the organizations to understand their customers, recommend the IT-driven solutions to tackle the customer relationship management challenges brought by COVID-19 and analyze the profitability of customers and products. The abilities to conduct research, critically evaluate the various management challenges, creatively make recommendations, and collaborate with colleagues, customers and other stakeholders are required for this project. 1)Defining the overall scope of the project so that the candidate can have a general idea of the position. 2)Developing an awareness campaign for clients and prospects to learn about our outreach services. 3)Further defining how to promote via print, radio, online or blasts to clients and prospects. 4)Reviewing and selecting technology to enable remote meetings via a tablet or iPad. Must allow wi-fi or cell coverage, video and be simple to operate (one-touch). 5)Embracing e-documents for clients to authorize, sign and open accounts

Marketing and Website Administrator

As a non-profit organization that supports local, independent businesses, Think Local First has pivoted its work to align with the needs of our member businesses during the pandemic. One of the programs we created sells gift certificates on behalf of local businesses in Greater Victoria and has grown to include businesses throughout BC.
Creating the business model to finance and manage this program that supports over 1,300 businesses in 66 communities came together quickly with the resources available at the time. We have sold over $400,000 in gift certificates and continue to work to improve the initiative to ensure it is meaningful to all participants. We work with businesses, community economic development organizations and customers.

Business Strategy Intern

Revela is a 1.5 year old startup; we are building a tool to improve the process of preparing, cleaning, and performing ongoing health validation in high-volume streaming data. We are at the stage of needing to refine the marketing direction of our technology in order to develop it into a saleable product.

Business Liaison and Marketing Coordinator

The Gander Area Business Recovery and Resiliency Project (BRRP) will assist local Small/Medium sized-businesses to remain resilient as we live and work with COVID-19 and prepare for the rebound of the economy in a post-COVID environment. The goal of the project is to help businesses navigate the public health measures required to conduct business and to assist businesses in developing a strong online presence to further their brand and reach to customers. The project is led by the Gander & Area Chamber of Commerce and directed by a Steering Committee.

DUTIES
Be the point of contact for local businesses with COVID-19 Health and Safety questions and their Business Recovery planning, including:
Staying up to date on latest public health recommendations
Helping businesses move their products and brands online; primarily Social Media platforms
Promoting training and learning opportunities
Lead the committee in development of a Shop Local Campaign including,
Marketing
Liaising with local businesses, organizations, and government officials
Work under the direction of a dynamic steering committee of local business leaders

Finance Intern

the intern will be involved in all aspects of accounting and financial management of the organization, helping run the day to day operations while building infrastructure and capacity to ensure smooth operations in the future. He will also interact with senior staff in organizational structure, strategic planing and budgeting.The intern will help ensure effective and efficient financial operations, leaving the organization on stronger accounting practices..

In-situ performance verification of the Pizza Oven Waste Energy Recovery (POWER) System within Restaurant Environments

The demonstration project provides the opportunity to substantiate the ability of the POWER system to repurpose wasted thermal energy from a cooking appliance’s exhaust gases and improve the overall restaurant energy performance across three Pizza Pizza locations within the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The data collected through the project will also allow for further development of our building modeling tools and establish Harvest’s ability to deliver a complete “Made-in-Canada” waste heat recovery package at the completion of the demonstration project.