Innovative Projects Realized

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.

Web tools for intelligent real-time data analysis

Data analysis plays an important role in healthcare as it enables service providers to discover hidden knowledge in the data, allowing them make more informed decisions about patients’ health. The continuing increase in the amount of data and lack of skilled people, however, has made data analysis very challenging. This project aims at developing web-based analytics and visualization tools to help researchers uncover new knowledge within the data much faster through automated analysis. Our initial efforts will focus on two disease registries for cancer and stoke patients, which Pulse InfoFrame Inc. has developed and currently manages. The long-term goal of this project is to enable Pulse InfoFrame Inc. develop and commercialize innovative health informatics tools, which will be of great interest to various markets. Our hope is that, once the tools are developed and are proven successful, they can be used to analyze data in other disease areas.

Desirable density in Vancouver’s rental housing market

Vancouver’s rental market is Canada’s most expensive. Financial constraints and need for more space often push families outside of the down-town area towards suburban areas. This research will propose a new type of housing likely to increase Vancouver’s retention capabilities towards this type of inhabitant. Census information shows that a net loss of 2% of new families decide to leave the city annually, suggesting that the housing infrastructure they require is not available. The market offers small apartments with no access to the outside and priced beyond the average financial means. Drawing from different models built around the world over the last ten years, this study proposes a new type of housing addressing needs of urban families as well as meeting the city’s densification targets. It is important for Vancouver, a city so internationally prized for its quality of life and cosmopolitan character, to diversify its housing offerings in order to stimulate a demographic variety in its center. This will ensure the equitable sustainability of the social and economic spheres of Vancouver as an urban entity.

Sensorless control of brushless DC motors at low speeds

Accelerated Systems is a leader in the design and implementation of control systems for electric vehicles; especially vehicles driven by permanent-magnet brushless DC (BLDC) motors.  One of the key technological challenges in the use of BLDC motors is that traditional control, especially at low speeds, requires external sensors to determine the rotor position.  These external sensors then become an added cost and maintenance challenge.  In this project, we will investigate novel control strategies that infer the rotor position from measurements of motor voltages and currents only.  A successful design will provide Accelerated Sytems with a unique technological advantage that will allow them to become the premier global supplier of controls for BLDC motors in electric vehicle applications.

Assessment, piloting and establishment of a green health care revolving fund

The objectives of the research are to identify and quantify barriers to energy efficiency in Ontario Hospitals, and to identify methods to confront these barriers, focusing largely on the efficacy of revolving funds. Research findings will contribute to improving financing mechanisms for energy efficiency measures to greater mobilize their implementation in Ontario Hospitals.

Analyzing a large user community using the social network analysis framework

In this project we will conduct Social network analysis (SNA) of MyCA user network, in order to assess the interplay between social influence and the diffusion of information within the MyCA platform. SNA offers a convenient method to represent and analyze interactions among the components of a system. SNA can thus provide an abstract representation of the MyCA a system, and allow us to study its function and organization. We will work with CA to determine ways to use our insights to increase participation of MyCA members such that their connections and contributions will bring overall value to the community. The results of this analysis will help us determine how to structure the platform and support community users such that greater value can be realized by community users, CA employees, and CA product owners.

CanGo – An Empowering Wayfinding Tool for Persons with Disabilities

For many persons with disabilities, for example those living with cognitive or visual impairments, it is often impossible to drive a personal vehicle and to travel independently, whether to school, to therapy, to their work place or to visit their friends. Because of their challenges, they must rely on caregivers or family members for transport, or use disability transport services that are often limited and quite unreliable. In many cases, those with disabilities lack the confidence to use public transit systems moreover, their parents or caregivers are often very wary of letting them travel by themselves.

Our research will involve extensive engagement and consultation with users, the development of a range of customized tools e.g. tools that provide alerts or notifications to users and caregivers. The adoption of CanGo could lead to huge benefits and reduced costs to individuals with special needs (through their increased independence), their families and caregivers, and to support services.

Boundary effects on spatial collision data aggregation to areal units

Traffic accident data aggregation relates with boundary issues is OTS's first project with University of Calgary. Several years of collision data, traffic network and neighborhood will be collected from OTS. This project contains implicit knowledge to improve the data aggregation method which has significant impact of data sharing on neighborhood boundaries. The first part of this study will focus on literature review and practicing existing methods to identify key factors and issues influencing the collision data aggregation on neighborhood boundaries. The second part is to find new efficient method of data aggregation from historical traffic safety related data. Results from the proposed study will help OTS to prepare more reasonable and justifiable spatial collision dataset for City of Edmonton. The propose study result expects to assist analyzing traffic accidents to reduce collision frequency and make the City of Edmonton safe from traffic accidents.

Aperture antennas as mobile satellite terminals

Antennas are essential part of communication links. This project is investigating antennas for communication between a mobile terminal on earth to a satellite. The mobile terminal could be a flying craft or a vehicle in motion. These antennas should be able to transmit and receive data simultaneously in different channels. Besides, they should be capable of scanning the space to find the target satellite. Single channel antennas or antennas with mechanical tracking have been tested for this purpose and are available in market. But, this project is investigating a single antenna of dual channels with simpler structure, lower profile, lower fabrication cost and specifically electronic tracking. Electronic tracking is much faster and more reliable than mechanical tracking by step motors which are bulky. These antennas are highly in demand in market. Hence, TRTech can benefit from commercialization of this product.

Disaster recovery and cloud bursting as a cloud service

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations consume computing power as a service. Infrastructure as a Service allows a company to move away from purchasing computing, networking, and storage resources to purchasing from a service provider in a public cloud. This project will research and develop off-site encrypted virtual machine storage and disaster recovery planning solution built using public cloud infrastructure. The solution offers Recovery as a Service that medium-sized enterprises utilize primarily for the ability to backup and restore virtual machines for server and virtual desktop images. The research and development team will working closely with company expert in the area of cloud computing to advance this research topic and implementation of the solution. We are developing a solution in the area of cloud computing disaster recovery and off-site encrypted file storage for hybrid clouds in an enterprise environment. A full analysis will be conducted on applying cloud computing platform and infrastructure in enterprise IT and the impact of business units within the organization. Recommendations for syncing images and automation of backups are encapsulated into a web service. Techniques such as caching of live virtual machines into a staging area of a public cloud (AWS EBS) will be utilized.

GPU-based fast fluids for video games

Animated fluid effects based on physical simulation have been a staple part of visual effects industry. They are characterized by offline simulation and rendering that produces high-fidelity dynamics and visuals. As the technology for computer games advances, the opportunity to create such effects in real-time as either a playback technique or dynamic simulation is becoming feasible. The internship will explore the integration of fast methods for fluid dynamics to determine their effectiveness for use in the video game industry.

Merging calculus learning with mobile devices: calculus practice app

This project will partner a student intern in graduate mathematics with the development team at Mathtoons Media Inc., an educational technology company in the business of creating mobile learning applications. Learning and academic practice is migrating away from traditional textbooks and webwork and toward mobile devices. The varying physical constraints of these devices post a significant challenge to the creators of mobile digital math practice applications. Questions which cover complex, high level topics within Calculus require significant alteration to fit properly within the scale of a small, handheld device. And yet, emerging research indicates students prefer to practice mathematics on handheld devices. This project will research the steps required to rapidly scale calculus questions to read and deliver well on various handheld devices within an “app experience” while still maintaining proper pedagogy with respect to the choice, sequencing and illustration of these questions. This provides a novel approach to current students learning.