UAVs for Building Envelope Inspection and Energy Audits

Space Heating and Cooling in residential, commercial, and institutional buildings accounted for roughly 20% of Canada’s overall energy. Early detection and repair of building envelope defects ensures continued energy performance and building longevity, thus energy audits are a necessary, but time-intensive process using today’s methods. Utilizing the emergent technology of small unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, […]

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Whales and ships within a British Columbia fjord system: assessing behavioral response and risk of strikes

As whales recover from the past centuries of whaling and as global trade compels shipping traffic to increase, we expect negative whale-ship interactions such as fatal strikes and noise disturbance to become an increasingly serious issue. To develop cost-effective and broadly applicable methods of assessing the risks of ships to whale feeding grounds, I propose […]

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An Assessment of Local Business’ Understandings and Needs for Community Leadership in a Small Urban Setting

Community leadership development and training programs must respond to changing corporate and public perceptions. There has been a lack of research on community leadership within small urban settings, where the impact that training and development programs have may be high. Our objective is to describe how local businesses in a small urban setting understand community […]

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Analysis to Facilitate Electric Public Transportation Demonstration Projects in the Canadian Urban Transit Research & Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC)

Battery electric busses (BEBs) are a promising emerging technology to replace the diesel buses currently the mainstay of public road transportation. Diesel buses contributed significantly to both climate-change related emissions, as well as local air quality issues. This project is examining a number of key issues associated with BEB adoption, in the context of a […]

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Smart Oceans:Instrumented,Interconnected,Intelligent Systems for Efficient Data Analysis and Querying

Title of the Project: Smart Oceans:Instrumented, Interconnected, Intelligent Systems for Efficient Data Analysis and Querying This project proposes three main objectves. The first two objectives serve to provide a deeper investigation of the problem space while the third objective will build on this investigation by exploring the application of new technologies to this problem domain. […]

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Pyrolysis of Rice Husks and Analysis of Biochar and Bio-oil

This project focuses on the pyrolysis of rice husks and the analysis of the resulting products, including biochar and bio-oil. Pyrolysis is the decomposition of organic matter under high heat in the absence of oxygen. This project examines the pyrolysis of rice husks. Rice husks account for 20% of the entire weight of the grain. […]

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Outward Bound Canada at 50: Reflections on philosophy, pedagogy and influence

Outward Bound (OB) was founded in 1941 and has influenced educational organizations internationally. Outward Bound Canada (OBC), founded in 1969, is nearing 50 and has yet to systematically compile its historical documents. This research project will establish a searchable and sustainable archive for the organization and for external researchers. The project will identify how OBC […]

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Global ground stability mapping with radar satellites

3v Geomatics (3vG) processes tens of thousands of radar satellite images annually to measure ground stability over time. The image processing pipeline demands very high storage and computation resources. The goal of this project is to enhance this pipeline so it can deliver better results faster. First, the project will profile and identify efficiency bottlenecks […]

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Wide area Motion Monitoring System (WAMS)

Noise interference is often a major challenge in signal recognition. In this project, our goal is to monitor ground and infrastructure movement based on data acquired using smart sensor technology. While related works have been extensively discussed in the literature, our contribution lies in exploring a reverse engineering procedure to remove noise from raw captured […]

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Energy Planning Analytical Research

The Energy Planning department at BC Hydro looks at how the company can meet B.C.’s future electricity demand through conservation, generation and transmission, and through upgrades to existing infrastructure. As new resources require lead times to develop, BC Hydro must plan ahead so that the new resources are ready when we need them. The Energy […]

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Fine-scale habitat use by juvenile Chinook Salmon in the Salish Sea

Juvenile Pacific Salmon survival in the Salish Sea has declined dramatically since the 1980s. Our work is part of the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project (SSMSP), an initiative which seeks to understand this decline. We have been developing an economical, small vessel-based method to study how juvenile Chinook Salmon use their habitat in more detail […]

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Enhancing Recommendation Engine for Open Source Software with Community Structures and Copulas

In the constantly expanding world of open source software and services, developers find it increasingly difficult to choose open source that is compliant, secure and reliable. There are millions of open source software and services publicly available today, and compliance, security and quality related information is extremely difficult for developers to find, making mindful selection […]

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