Projets novateurs réalisés

Education, Community Engagement and Unconventional Oil and Gas Development: North East British Columbia

Education preparedness is important for communities to engage in the resource sector development. This ranges from having the minimum requirements of a high school diploma to acquiring trades expertise or have a professional designation. Often overlooked are the reasons for gaps in this area. The goal of this research is first to determine the gaps, and second to map them in a manner that highlights the differences of the communities interviewed. The directed interviews about baseline education levels associated with academic preparedness and skills training was analyzed to determine what type of support is lacking in the Natural Gas development. The interviews took place throughout the Monteny Region of NE British Columbia region to assist with Liquid Natural Gas development. This assessment focused on what educational resources are currently in place, and assessed their ability to meet and deliver program in support of specific skill development, their potential to enhance skills training in partnership with local authorities trough all phases of education K-12 to apprentice and/or university education. This second part of the research will map the results, and provide an outline detailing procedures and expectations associated with an outreach strategy employed by potential oil and gas producers.

Development of new approaches to promote proliferation of insulin producing pancreatic ?-cells in diabetic patients

Reduced number of insulin producing ?-cells in pancreas due to increased ?-cell death is a key defect in diabetes that eventually leads to elevated blood glucose levels and life-time treatment with glucose lowering drugs or daily insulin injections. Thus, finding therapeutic approaches to prevent the decrease in the number of insulin producing ?-cells in diabetic patients either by reducing ?-cell death or by increasing their proliferation is of great importance. In this study, we will use transformed and primary islet ?-cells, to investigate the effects of five purified natural products (to be provided by Blue-O Medicals Inc.) on ?-cell proliferation, function, and death. The findings of this study may lead to development of new therapeutic approaches to maintain enough number of ?-cells in diabetic patients to keep blood glucose within normal range thereby prevent progression of diabetes.

Spelling Correction for Improved Detection of Malicious Chat Messages

Cyberbullying, sexting, profanity and other forms of malicious chat messages have become increasingly common in online virtual worlds and social networks that are used by children and teenagers. These conversations are dangerous to children. The partner organization has already implemented a rule based filtering system to filter out malicious messages. However, not all the malicious messages can be filtered out since people invent subtler forms of malicious messages in an effort to subvert such filtering systems. This project will employ the spelling correction techniques to convert the subtler forms of malicious messages into their original forms. It can improve the performance of filtering system to be more robust against subtler forms of malicious messages.

Housing Boom and Bust in Resource-based Economy-the Case of Ordos City, China

Ordos is a resource-based city located in Inner Mongolia, China, which currently undergoes a financial crisis caused by a collapsing housing market. During the past 15 years, the housing market in Ordos City has experienced a boom and bust cycle. This research aims to conduct a systematic and scientific research to thoroughly explore the reasons behind this unfortunate crisis. The significance and uniqueness of this research lie in the discussion of housing market in a resource-based economy, which is a missing part in the existing studies. By collecting and analyzing data, running mathematical models, conducting surveys and interviews, this research aims to identify the critical factors of a resource-based economy that may affect housing development, and then to explore to what extent these factors affect housing market in Ordos City. In addition, this research is targeted to inform policy-making and implementation on housing market management and natural resource development in Ordos City, as well as offer suggestions to prevent the similar crisis that may occur in other resource-based regions.

Development of Innovative Approaches to Assess Health Effects of Transportation Infrastructure Projects

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The holistic nature of this definition provides the basis for an all-encompassing evaluation of health, which is the guiding principle behind health impact assessment (HIA). An emerging area of public concern in Canada is the assessment of the potential impact that transportation infrastructure has on human health. HIA is ideally placed for such an assessment. Broadly, HIA can provide an evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of transportation infrastructure projects on community health, and help inform and provide decision-makers with an opportunity to minimize adverse health outcomes and maximize health benefits. At Intrinsik Environmental Sciences Inc., our Mitacs intern will work closely with our professional scientific staff to research and develop a framework for conducting health impact assessments of transportation infrastructure projects in Canada.

Development of a Patient Aid for Grading of Acne Severity and a Comprehensive Acne Quality of Life Instrument (CompAQ) for Acne Patients

The overall objective of this work is to gain a better understanding of the experience of patients living with acne and how to support their decision making process in terms of acne treatment options. This research will investigate issues surrounding how patients understand how to accurately determine the severity of their acne and the treatment options available to them. From this, an effective patient aid will be developed to inform and support patient’s decision-making process when seeking treatment. This patient aid will include an acne severity grading scale, and established treatment guidelines. This study will also develop a comprehensive measure of acne quality of life (CompAQ) to gain a better understanding of the experience of patients living with acne above and beyond the physical concerns (e.g., psychological and social considerations). This measure will help to determine quality of life outcomes resulting from acne treatments in clinical trials.

Business Intelligence and Recommendation for Samsung Knox Community Forum

Companies usually use private forums to share sensitive information and discuss strategies. Valuable business knowledge is hidden inside the user generated content in these forums and waiting to be extracted and reused. Knox Community Forum, a thriving private forum inside Samsung where employers from all around the world post content like win notices of deals, meeting agendas of customers, business objectives, various news and technical issues online. In spite of large numbers of posts generated on Knox Community Forum every day, Samsung does not yet have tools to analyze the content of the posts. The intern will gain access to real business forum data set of Samsung and extract data fields from unstructured post content and perform business intelligence mining including business trends summarization and prediction. Previous customer requirements and sale solution will also be mined and paired. A new personalized recommendation algorithm will be developed to recommend the best solution summarized from past requirement-solution pairs given a specific customer and help the sales agent to better engage the customer

Increasing Visibility to Living Musqueam Histories Through Cultural Tourism

The Musqueam Nation has lived in the territory encompassing Vancouver and surrounding areas for thousands of years. One of the largest ancient village and burial sites is c??sna?m. From relationships with neighboring First Nations to welcoming the first explorers, Musqueam has a rich history of intercultural engagement, including its connection to Chinese migrants from Southern China who operated market gardens at xwm??kw?y??m (Musqueam Indian Reserve 2) during the 20th century. This history remains unknown to Vancouverites and visitors to BC. Two interns will work with Musqueam Capital Corporation to develop educational resources to provide visibility to these living histories. Conducting research from Musqueam archival materials, with respect to community protocols and in collaboration with experts and stakeholders, they will create compelling and accessible cultural tourism materials including brochures, film clips, and exhibition materials for Musqueam enterprises that are required to educate the public and foster respectful intercultural relationship building.

Usable Interface Design for Real Time Transaction Monitoring in a Diverse User Environment

Interface designs based on initial consultations with one group of users are often found to not be suitable for other groups. This a problem both in practice and for our understanding of interface design. This project investigates why this happens, using as an example a system developed for INETCO Systems. The immediate objectives include understanding the basis of the design of the existing system, and discussing it with various kinds of customers. One of the main goals will be to understand how the current situation came to be, and to recommend ways to better proceed with designing interfaces in the future.

Based SLAM (ASLAM) for Indoor/Outdoor Urban Terrain

The objective of this project is the research of multi-sensor Appearance Based SLAM (ASLAM) system for day/night operations in indoor and outdoor environments. These algorithms would perform place recognition based on multiple sensor data (Imagery, laser and radar) gathered from a UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) as it travels through the environment. When the vehicle returns to a previously visited scene, the ASLAM algorithm will recognize the scene, update its internal representation, report this to the UGV.

MDA would benefit from the internship as the research of multi-sensor ASLAM techniques by the intern would contribute to this project greatly. Moreover, the involvement of UBC Professors Jim Little and David Lowe, who are experts in robotics and computer vision, would be highly valuable to this project too.

Role of 5alpha-Dihydrotestosterone and Androgen Receptor in Estrogen Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer affecting women, with 1 in 9 Canadian females expected to develop the disease in their lifetime. About 90% of estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancers express androgen receptor (AR). Recent results in our laboratory demonstrated that the inactivation of 5alpha-dihydrotestosterone (DHT), the most potent androgen, contributes to estrogen-dependent breast cancer cell growth, and suggested additional pathways for DHT action in addition to the AR pathway. Our focus is to elucidate the role of AR and DHT in ER-positive breast cancer. To that end, we will use in vitro (cell-based) and in vivo models and perform functional assays and gene expression analyses. This experimental study in the area of oncology has the potential to identify genes and proteins associated with androgen pathways in growth regulation of estrogen-dependent breast cancer, and therefore can offer a starting point for the identification of new drug targets for combinatorial treatment of this cancer.

Ulkatcho integrated resource utilization and business planning

The Ulkatcho First Nation is being empowered by the provincial government to take more control over its socio and economic affairs. One critical parts of the transitioning is for the Ulkatcho First Nation to manage their forest resources and operate forest related, manufacturing and energy businesses. The Yun Ka Whu’ten Development LP will be an active participant in their economic future, particularly in the area of forest land management, energy planning, community development and the manufacturing of wood and non-wood products. The transitioning for Ulkatcho community is a huge challenge and the purpose of this applied research project is to assist them with a set of ‘assessments’ of the key priority topics identified by their community and business leaders. The research can be classified into three main areas: land and resource management, business planning and regional economic development. The proposed topics include: Mountain caribou conservation design, mushroom growth analysis and wild food business, Chinese wood market analysis, product and corporate branding, wood pellet production, infrastructure analysis and logistics planning, bioenergy strategy and a deep sea port feasibility study.