Projets novateurs réalisés

Morton Food Service

This project will help Morton’s Foods make better day-to-day decisions and coordinate customer outreach. We will review available sales, orders, product, and inventory data to define a short list of clear KPIs and build easy-to-read dashboards for leaders and operations. In parallel, we will set up a simple, multi-user SMS process with shared templates, consent/opt-out handling, and basic tracking of replies and re-orders. The work will fit the tools the company already uses and be documented so staff can maintain it. Expected benefits include a consistent view of performance and trends, quicker customer follow-ups, improved demand visibility, fewer stockouts, and stronger repeat orders for the partner organization.

TrendAI Market Innovation Research

Project Summary

TrendAI is an advanced AI-powered SaaS platform designed to transform the fashion industry by enabling brands to anticipate trends, optimize inventory, and improve customer engagement. This project centers on two complementary initiatives: primary market research and innovation development.

The research project focuses on identifying niche opportunities within the Canadian fashion market and ensuring strong product-market fit. Key activities include mapping target customer segments such as independent retailers, mid-sized brands, and e-commerce businesses; analyzing their pain points in demand forecasting, inventory management, and consumer engagement; and validating the effectiveness of TrendAI’s solution. A critical component of this research is the recruitment of potential customers as beta testers. Their insights will shape TrendAI’s roadmap, ensuring its features and strategy are directly aligned with industry needs.

The innovation project builds on these insights to refine TrendAI’s business model, marketing strategies, and product offerings. Emphasis will be placed on enhancing AI algorithms for improved forecasting accuracy, developing a user-friendly interface, and ensuring seamless integration with e-commerce and inventory management systems. In parallel, targeted go-to-market strategies will be developed to accelerate adoption among Canadian fashion brands.

A marketing intern will play a vital role in executing these initiatives, conducting competitive and trend research, engaging early adopters, supporting marketing content and campaigns, and analyzing customer feedback.

The methodology combines AI-driven market analysis, digital marketing tools, and structured feedback loops through surveys, interviews, and beta testing. This iterative approach ensures both the product and strategy evolve in line with customer requirements and market realities.

The outcome of this project will be a validated market position in Canada, a strong base of early adopters, and a refined platform offering. By aligning its innovative analytics solution with customer needs, TrendAI is positioned to become a leader in AI-powered solutions for the fashion industry.

AI-Driven Workplace Accommodation System

Magnify Access is partnering with Sheridan’s Centre for Applied AI (CAAI) to advance the Workplace Accommodation System (W-PAS), a technology platform designed to streamline workplace accommodations for employees with disabilities. This collaborative project has two key objectives: (A) to strengthen the Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of W-PAS to improve the accuracy and relevance of its accommodation recommendations and (B) to validate the platform’s assumptions and outputs through research and testing. The project will engage Sheridan’s staff, faculty, and students in developing machine learning models using curated datasets of workplace accommodations, functional limitations, and environments. It will also include structured validation activities, such as user testing and expert reviews, to ensure that W-PAS’s recommendations align with real-world needs and accessibility standards. The anticipated outcomes include the creation of a robust, AI-enabled recommendation engine, evidence-based insights into accommodation best practices, and new knowledge on how AI can reduce barriers in workplace inclusion. For Sheridan’s students, this project will provide valuable applied research experience in AI, accessibility, and inclusive design. For industry and community partners, the project promises a validated and scalable solution that improves efficiency for employers, reduces bias in decision-making, and creates a more equitable and productive work environment for employees with disabilities.

Large Scale Airline Crew Scheduling

In the airline industry, crew planning is an essential task that every airline will face. Flight crew expenses constitute the second largest operating cost (Kohl and Karisch. 2004), second only to the rising cost of fuel. Crew planning refers to the assignment of flight segments to pilots and flight attendants so that they start and end at their base city, do not work more than the allowed time, etc. Because crew planning has a significant economic impact on the financial wellbeing of an airline, even small percentage improvements can easily translates into large cost savings, especially in nowadays’ highly competitive aviation industry with many low-fare carriers and thin profit margins. Given the numbers of flights and flight attendants, optimizing such an operation for an airline is daunting task. Navtech is a Waterloo-based company that specializes in helping airlines perform this complex operation. The current project will explore more advanced ways to improve the current solution platform they provide.

Biomedical Engineering Research Internship

The proposed project aims to improve and scale femfit – a medical device designed to help women manage urinary incontinence – for increased manufacturing capabilities and improved performance. Interns Sarah Mack and Mairi Brydon will work alongside acclaimed researchers at the pelvic floor group of the University of Auckland; Sarah focusing on adjusting the injection molding manufacturing process to accommodate a larger production volume, and Mairi researching ways to make the sensor array within femfit more durable. By enhancing the reliability and production capabilities of femfit the interns are contributing to urinary incontinence research – an extremely relevant yet rarely discussed aspect of women’s health. This research helps to connect two institutes on opposite sides of the globe, aiding in strengthening the research community at Memorial University by fostering connections between students and professors alike. It reinforces Memorial’s position as a reputable and innovative institute, and provides the interns with unique international research, training, and learning opportunities.

L2M – Scalable 3D Digital Twin Creation for Large Scale Infrastructure Using Autonomous UAVs, NeRF, and Metaverse Platform

In Canada’s remote and weather-challenged regions, inspecting critical infrastructure like bridges or monitoring agricultural sites such as vertical farms often involves costly, dangerous, and infrequent field visits. This project explores whether there is a commercial market for a new platform that enables engineers to perform these inspections remotely, using virtual reality (VR), autonomous drones, and artificial intelligence.

The technology creates high-detail 3D digital replicas—called “digital twins”—of real-world assets like bridges. It uses drones to collect data, AI to automatically detect cracks or damage, and VR to let users inspect and collaborate without needing to be on site. The aim of this project is not to develop the technology further, but to validate whether infrastructure owners and operators would actually buy and use it. Through interviews with companies like Manitoba Hydro and municipal inspection teams, we will identify pain points, test pricing models, and determine how this system could best support Canada’s infrastructure needs.

If successful, this solution could significantly reduce inspection costs, improve safety, and help ensure early detection of problems in hard-to-reach areas—ultimately making Canada’s infrastructure smarter, safer, and more resilient.

Fabrication and Design internship

Seacork Studio is developing compostable architectural acoustic panels made from a seaweed biocomposite. This internship project will support Seacork in designing and producing a professional sample kit program, a impact-plaque system,and product photography. This creates a repeatable pipeline for design-firm outreach, accelerates specifications, and strengthens evidence-based sustainability storytelling at installs.

Further investigation of Paced Electrogram Fraction Analysis (PEFA)

The goal of this project is to develop a faster and more accurate way to detect ventricular tachycardia using an algorithm to analyze the signal results from Paced Electrogram Fractionation Analysis (PEFA); ideally real time through use of a basket catheter. St Jude Medical, our research partner, creates medical hardware specifically geared towards detecting and treating heart disease, including arrhythmia. If we are successful in our endeavor, they hope to gain an improved diagnostic system. This system will be more accurate than their old system (EnSite Velocity®), as it will use pacing rather than passive signals in the heart, and faster, as it will use a basket catheter to concurrently map all sites. The end result of this will be that fewer patients with ventricular tachycardia will be missed in hospitals and, in turn, fewer patents will present with associated diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and myocardial infarctions.

The development of a disposable stick-on hip protector for the prevention of hip fractures in hospitalized patients

Hip fractures exert a profound toll on the independence and quality of life of older people, and over 95% are due to falls. Over 2000 hip fractures occur annually in hospitals in Canada. Wearable hip protectors are a promising method for preventing hip fractures, but patient compliance in wearing traditional garment-based hip protectors averages below 20%. In this project, we will examine whether patient compliance in wearing the device is improved by a disposable, low cost stick-on hip protector, which provides increased force attenuation, and little risk for pad shifting, when compared to current devices. A pre-post intervention trial will be conducted in two wards at Surrey Memorial Hospital. Our sample size will allow us to detect a clinically meaningful difference of 20% in compliance. This project will immerse the intern in working with industry and clinical collaborators to evaluate new technology in the clinical environment. Our clinical trial results may provide our industry partner, Blue Tree, with an evidence base necessary for successful product marketing, and essential information for further design iterations.

Chimera One – Real-Time AI Mission Autonomy for UAV Operation

Every growing season, farmers face a race against time. Pests, disease, and drought can damage crops in days — but current drone and satellite tools often take 1–2 days to process data. By then, the opportunity to act may already be gone.

Chimera One is building a “real-time brain” for drones. Instead of sending images to the cloud and waiting for results, our technology processes them on the spot, during the flight. Within seconds, farmers know exactly where to look, whether it’s a patch of stressed wheat or a vineyard row needing attention.

Our system combines drone sensors (NDVI, RGB, thermal) with ground-based data (soil moisture, rainfall, canopy growth). This sensor fusion creates precise crop health maps, delivered instantly to a phone or tablet. The goal: make same-day action the norm, not the exception.

We’re starting with wheat and vineyards, partnering with leading agricultural institutions and growers to validate and refine the technology. By making insights immediate, Chimera One aims to help farmers protect yields, reduce chemical use, and work more efficiently — benefits that ripple across the entire agricultural value chain.

Open Scholarship and Artificial Intelligence

Digital technologies and practices—including social networking—are now pervasive and have been adopted society-wide. This creates new possibilities for engagement and interaction among academic professionals, research partners, collaborators, stakeholders, students, and additional members of the
public. This project focuses on continuing to advance the research, analysis, and engagement of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons: an open, digital platform for research collaboration and sharing – working in theoretical and pragmatic terms to understand how best to leverage digital research infrastructures to advance open, social scholarship in ways that speak to the needs of humanities and social sciences communities. It does so in the context of generative artificial intelligence.

This collaboration builds on and extends previous Mitacs-funded work, and is undertaken by a multi-career level team at the University of Victoria in its Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments SSHRC-funded Partnership. When complete, the Canadian HSS Commons will serve communities such as those represented by Iter Canada and groups beyond, as it empowers individual researchers to develop, exchange, and share open access publications, drafts, preprints, datasets, and teaching materials through a national-scale, multilingual (including French and
English) platform, which combines many features of institutional repositories and social networking sites.

Rapid next generation infectious disease diagnostics for tuberculosis and leptospirosis

Infectious diseases remain one of the largest killers of the human population and disproportionately so in developing countries. Assays for the rapid and comprehensive identification of causative strains of the infectious disease agents in tuberculosis and leptospirosis is currently lacking. These infections represent over 20 million cases annually. Existing diagnostic protocols involve lengthy and resource-intensive procedures which substantially hinder the timely administration of treatment regimens. This project aims to combine cutting edge molecular biology protocols with next generation DNA sequencing and cloud computing resources to develop superior diagnostic assays for tuberculosis and leptospirosis. The intern will conduct the wet lab experiments required for developing these assays, bridging the molecular assay design steps with the cloud computing implementation of interpreting assay test results. The project objectives and logistical requirements are well matched to Fusion Genomics’ expertise and research mandate, in further developing the company’s suite of next generation clinical diagnostics products.