Innovative Projects Realized

Structural and Thermal Analysis of an Insulated EPP Wall Panel System Design

Factory-built structural insulated panels are used for off-site building construction to minimize the labour needed for construction framing, which aims to save construction time and improve the quality of the installation. The panels, instead of using wood or steel framing, are the structural support for walls. Although the insulated panels provide structure, additional reinforcements are needed in order for the panels to be used on a multi-storey residential building. Using numerical simulations, this research investigates the predicted locations where the addition of such reinforcements would promote excessive heat loss through the walls which leads to increased energy consumption for the host building. The structural design of the panels would then be revised in the aim of minimizing heat loss. The partner organization is focused on developing energy efficient construction products and the outcomes of this research would provide insight to further improve and develop the proposed insulated panels in consideration of sustainability and energy efficiency.

Operational Improvement Specialist

The Vancouver Aquarium, an Ocean Wise initiative, is home to thousands of ocean species and amazing aquatic life. It is also Ocean Wise headquarters, where our scientists, educators and conservation experts do their work, not only to protect our oceans but to inspire others to join us in our mission. The internship will review accounting processes with the intent of reducing paper documents as well as develop document management systems that could be applied to the contracts as well as accounting documents.

Machine Learning for User Behaviour Prediciton in Mobile Games

With the growth of the social networks and mobile gaming devices in recent years, the social gaming
became an important part of the game industry. These social games provide huge amount of data
about the users’ behaviors, an important issue for the gaming companies is to analyze this data and
model the choices and behavior of the users and based on this model they try to improve their product
and predict the behaviors of their users. The expected benefit to the partner organization is the
research and adaption of new techniques for modeling user behaviour for social gaming

MITACS McMaster 2020

The company is developing a next generation, portable diagnostic drug testing platform. The product is designed to provide fast and accurate on-site drug detection. The goal is to develop a point-of-care (POC), real-time oral fluid drug screening platform for the detection of Drugs of Abuse initially focusing on cannabis and alcohol.

Public Relations Intern

Citizen Relations is a public relations agency with clients across a variety of industries, such as entertainment, travel and tourism, CPGs, health and wellness, and beyond. With the cancellation of intern programs across local post-secondary institutions, Citizen Relations finds that it has a fair bit of work available that would lend itself well to a summer internship. It feels strongly that this would, not only add value to its company in the short-term but would also provide a valuable experience for local students looking to immerse themselves in the dynamic world of agency PR. The intern would be involved with both internal and external communications, research, analysis, and other activities and would play an important role in helping both Citizen Relation’s clients and the company as an agency restore and pivot business operations in this new environment.

Business Analyst Co-op

I will be joining TTT Studios as a Business Analyst Co-op student where I will be assisting the company with sales proposals by collaborating with the engineering and design team. As a Business Analyst Co-op, I will be documenting product and project flows, developing reports and presentations, as well as recognizing any potential improvements to be made with current processes.

Our sales channels feed our engineering and design teams. We had booked enough work to sustain our engineering and design teams up until recently (most projects last three to nine months) but now, many of those projects are coming to an end. Much of the future work we had in our pipeline has dried out directly due to COVID19. We need to maximize the opportunities we have currently in our pipeline so that we can keep away from any situation where we would have to lay anyone on the team off. The intern will provide us with more bandwidth on the sales side and help us create the best presentations possible for when we make our pitches to potential clients.

Data Analyst and Special Projects co-op

Prior to Spring Break, BC teachers had engaged JABC to deliver 1,246 programs to students and we had 600 programs registered for the time between April 1st and June 30th. JABC was on track to deliver 1,900 JA programs to BCâ€TMs youth.
Of course, circumstance changed considerably in March, and as soon as JABC learned that schools would be closed, we worked with our colleagues across the country to make our programs available digitally. With this new platform of program delivery, comes the challenge of tracking and analyzing users and their engagement. The Special Projects and Data Analytics Co-op student will provide the support, as JABC charters these new waters, to understand the data, the metrics and translate the information into reports and communicate what is relevant and appropriate.
Additionally, JABC conducts educator and volunteer surveys, more so now with these new technologies and platform in place, to gather feedback directly from our customers and end users. The data received, will need to analyzed and translated into informative pieces that can be used to enhance our programs and measure impact.

rTraction

rTraction needs to come up with a new overall business plan and related strategy to our product and service offering for the next 6-12 months. The intern will be working with the team on:
• Analyzing current service offerings for profitable/loss leading activities (IE: what works, what doesn’t)
• Market research for new products & services (potentially talking to prospective customers, using open data sources)
• Business model structure / financial models on new services
• Marketing tactics (another team member will do implementation)
• Marketing plan (writing, research)
This will allow rTraction to have it’s marketing, communication and business plan primed and ready to go for Q4. Historically Q4 is the best performing/busiest quarter and if we do not perform well in the quarter the chances of rTraction surviving to 2021 are low.

Characterization of a DTI Tractography Pipeline for 3D Visualization of Spinal Cord Pathology

Spinal cord pathology causes significant burden to the individual and society-at-large. Treatment is complex and made more difficult by difficulties in clinical imaging of the cord microstructure. Using recent advances in image acquisition techniques and image processing toolsets, this project will investigate a semi-automated pipeline to visualize boundaries of spinal cord pathology for the purpose of translation to computer-assisted neurosurgery. This project is expected to provide critical information to the industry partner to establish appropriate protocols for their industry-leading commercial products in this area.

Successful implementation of agile techniques on manufacturing processes for a fast growing robotics start-up

Agile management techniques are designed to be responsive to unpredictable project changes along the manufacturing process. Such changes result from the sensitivity and particular requirements of different projects. These projects require multiple dependencies that evolve during the project execution. Agile techniques aim to prevent costly (i.e., inefficient) and wasteful planning (i.e., ineffective) that can lead to overrun time and budget. This is particularly important for fast-growing companies with multi-disciplinary operations that are difficult to plan reliably. Therefore, the current internship aims to understand, analyse, and resolve the emerging issues within the manufacturing process as consequences of various project requirements. To that aim, the internship has two key objectives:
1. Identify the state in which the manufacturing process, considering the diversity of project requirements, can benefit from agile techniques as opposed to Waterfall approaches.
2. Adopt the most appropriate agile technique to successfully meet the emerging project requirements.

State of the Art Study of Monorail Test Guideway Constructed with NonFerrousReinforced Concrete

Bombardier Transportation’s (BT) recently developed Innovia 300 Monorail prototype vehicle
will be tested on a new monorail test track/guideway at BT’s Millhaven, Ontario facility. Of the
150 + reinforced concrete beams that make up the guideway, one of the beams is reinforced
using glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars.
Structural monitoring of the beams will be conducted during monorail tests to evaluate the
relative performance of the GFRP beam to an adjacent steel reinforced beam. Data will be
analyzed and interpreted to determine if the beams will perform as intended, and if any
design optimization can be made. Information obtained can then be used to suggest how
GFRP could be implemented in full scale infrastructure systems. The intern will take part in
technical discussions with BT engineers, where specific challenges (areas of interest) that
they face will be identified and the intern will look for solutions to meet those needs.

Visualizing how Physiology affects Tactile Audio

Wearables are starting to include advanced haptic technology, touch feedback like vibrations, to help people create and listen to music, experience virtual reality (VR) environments, and improve accessibility for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. Designing haptic feedback takes advanced knowledge about physiology and neuroscience that engineers and designers may not have access to. We are using computer-aided visualizations, like maps of the skin or mini-simulations about how the skin reacts to vibration, to help engineers and designers build better, more effective devices and experiences.