Filmmakers often use background elements to shape mood, guide emotions, and add meaning to a story. In Mother! (Aronofsky, 2017), violent events unfold behind the protagonist while the camera remains in close-up on her face, creating tension between focal attention and surrounding action. In Midsommar (Aster, 2019), faces and symbolic forms subtly emerge in trees […]

During the stay the intern will be carrying out the following duties and responsibilities: The intern will be engaged in a research project on AI-driven procedural content generation. The intern will explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to automatically generate content such as game levels or puzzles. By combining AI with procedural generation, […]

This project examines how the disappearance, relocation, and redevelopment of neighborhood markets in Manila reshape cultural memory, daily routines, and community belonging. Markets such as palengke, sari-sari stores, and small commercial corridors have long served as social infrastructures where familiarity, recognition, and shared practices form through everyday interaction. As many of these spaces are demolished […]

In the late sixteenth century, a distinctive Italian painting style emerged, characterized by the contrast of light and darkness, known as chiaroscuro. While this artistic development is often seen as a stylistic or optical advancement, My PhD dissertation argues that the light-dark interplay in Italian Counter-Reformation paintings, especially those showing a repentant figure, has deep […]

ESSA Technologies Ltd. is an employee-owned Canadian environmental consulting company that combines science, systems thinking, and collaboration to address complex environmental challenges. With offices in Vancouver and Ottawa, ESSA supports clients across Canada and internationally through evidence-based decision-making, sustainability planning, and adaptive management solutions. As the company continues to expand its client base and internal […]

Our proposed research investigates how K-12 teachers learn and customize digital classroom tools and learning management systems and how they share this information with each other. In particular, we will be working with our partner Microsoft to investigate the use and customization of the recently developed OneNote Class Notebooks software that is increasingly being used […]

Kobo is an online e-book retailer that provides recommendations for future purchases to its user base. One difficulty that recommendation systems face is what is known as the “cold-user” problem. In this scenario, when we know so little of a user’s preferences (for example, if they are new to the platform), we do not have […]

In automatic casting applications, the aim is to accurately recognise facial regions that correspond to a same actor appearing in a movie to produce described video. In particular, this project will focus on challenging tasks of capturing and modeling the facial trajectory for each person appearing in a movie in order to predict when/where the […]

Building on top of the numerous recent advances in deep learning (and in machine learning in general), we aim at learning high-level, semantically plausible representations of animation data and human from 3D skeletal data in order to automate or replace different tasks of the animation pipeline which require sometimes rigorous human work. Specifically, the tasks […]

Les phases alpha sont des étapes importantes avant le lancement d’un jeu vidéo. Durant ces périodes, une version alpha du jeu peut être jouée par un nombre significatif de joueurs permettant d’évaluer tous ses mécanismes. L’analyse de l’activité sur les forums et les réseaux sociaux et la connaissance des sujets qui animent la communauté naissante […]

Réaliser une animation réaliste d’un visage dans l’industrie du jeu vidéo est un défi technique. Il est extrêmement complexe, y compris pour les meilleurs animateurs 3D, de produire une animation faciale réaliste. Une manière de résoudre ce problème est de le voir d’un autre angle : pourquoi simuler une chose que l’on peut capturer ? […]

Item-to-item and user-to-item recommendations are prevalent on most ecommerce websites and digital content related mobile applications. At Kobo, we strive to constantly improve our recommendation system, which is based on co-purchase patterns on Kobo’s website or through Kobo eReaders and mobile apps. This internship is to explore improving the system along several dimensions: incorporating additional […]