Innovative Projects Realized

Westland Insurance Group – Communications, New Media, and Technology Internship Project

Westland Insurance has grown into one of Canada’s largest independently owned insurance distribution businesses. Our head office is located in Surrey, British Columbia, and we have over 190 locations across Canada. This internship project will involve identifying the best local and national practices around marketing, communications, media, employee learning management, digital content creation and technical systems management to optimize the organization’s brand awareness. The interns will search for best practices, identify gaps, recommend changes or enhancements, and complete a review of Westland’s existing practices and programs in a few different departments, focusing on communications, new media, and information technology. This project will impact various areas of our organization, supporting our teams in the above-mentioned departments to implement a number of most needed changes and improvements.

Exploring the agronomic and soil health benefits of liming in the Prairies

Soil acidity in Alberta and northeastern British Columbia has been recognized as a problem since the early 1960’s. With the current application of N fertilizers, this problem has persisted making it unsustainable to maintain high crop yields in the long term. This project hypothesizes that the one-time application of lime to increase soil pH will lead to increased crop yields and promote soil health. On-farm research will be undertaken to demonstrate directly to producers how to employ lime as a management tool and its benefits to farm income. This project will benefit producers, crop commissions as high yield implies increased farm income and dues and the Ag industry at large.

BSI Internship – Dylan Barry

The project will consist of the intern utilizing the knowledge acquired from their academic institute and applying it to the partner organization’s development team to assist in getting the company’s product ready for commercialization. The overall objective of this project is to leverage machine learning and Natural Language
Processing (NLP) to create an engaging learning environment for financial intelligence.
Primary project objectives include:
1. Bibliographical Review
2. Develop user stories framework and design conversation flow
3. Build and configure backend infrastructure for Intelligent Bot
4. Train natural language processor to understand user intent
5. Incorporate innovations into the user interface

Dynamic Appointment Scheduling for Radiation Therapy

Radiation treatment (RT) is one of the primary methods for treating cancer. The Radiation Medicine Program (RMP) in Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PMCC) is Canada’s largest of its kind. It delivers around 11,000 courses of radiation treatment for over 8000 patients annually. RT uses Linear Accelerators (LINAC) to deliver high-energy rays to destroy or shrink cancer cells. With 16 LINAC units and uncertainty in future demand, scheduling appointments at RMP is a complex task. Given the increasing demand for RT, reducing waiting times through advanced approaches to scheduling is of high interest. In this project, we will develop new mathematical models and methods for dynamic scheduling of appointments at PMCC and evaluate their performance using both simulation experiments and in a pilot implementation at PMCC. The methods and tools developed through this project are expected to reduce patient waiting times, improve patient outcomes, and reduce costs.

EcoBloc Next Stage Operations & Growth Plan

EcoBloc sustainably improves regional food security and food safety while also reducing the impact of harmful chemicals on water, soil, and animals. Eco Bloc’s non-lethal technology protects assets in the global food supply chain, including animals, animal feed, crop inventory, seeds, equipment and other assets against biosecurity risk and asset destruction originating from mice and rats. This project will bring forward the product development stages by utilizing a software engineer and the organizational capacity in terms of partnerships and marketing through support interns.

Triware Technologies Edge-to-Cloud Program

Triware Technologies Inc. (Triware) is a leading Newfoundland-based information technology consulting and support firm, with public and private sector clients throughout the province. The company has extensive experience in business technology consulting and management with private sector clients, government organizations and public agencies. Our previous and current engagements include roles and responsibilities such as current, support provision, project management, web / application development and technology consulting.

As our clients move out of the pandemic and resume full business operations we recgonize an opportunity to help drive cloud adoption, allowing small-to-medium business and small-to-medium enterprises to become more agile and better address business intruptions moving forward. To achieve this Triware requires a focus on shifting our current and future clients from local networking and data management to a cloud-centered approach.

Grain Quality and Traceability Mobile App Development

Farms currently suffer from undervalued commodities, spoilage, and traceability issues. While Canadian growers can market their own grain, this places extra responsibilities on the grower such as monitoring the time, price, and place they wish to sell their grain. To determine the price of grain one must be able to determine the quality of the grain and the quantity. To grade the quality of the grain, samples must be taken to identify characteristics such as damage caused by insects, moisture, or temperature. Grain sampling can be a time-consuming process because traditionally a representative sample requires a person to take a sample from grain flowing from the auger at regular time intervals.

VeriGrain Sampling Inc. has produced a system to automatically (using the extractor) and semi-automatically (using only the mobile app) help perform grain sampling and data management. They want to build onto their mobile app to provide further functionality for growers, buyers, and consumers of the agriculture industry. This BSI project focuses on two items: 1) Improving the mobile application’s user interface and 2) integrating a grain analysis source into the mobile application.

Scale up of Recycling Processes of Polymer-coated Papers and Coffee Cups

This internship aims to improve the design and development of an innovative patented process to recycle these polymer-coated paper products and waste coffee cups. By addressing the issue of waste papers, using this green technology, we would save 80% of water, while also achieving a 74% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and a 35% reduction in water-polluting emissions. This would also help Canada in achieving its commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, and in meeting its international commitments on global warming, net-zero emissions, and deforestation in:
• The Paris Agreement
• The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference also known as ‘COP26 Climate Summit’ in Glasgow, Scotland).

Development of innovative solutions for analyzing biological samples in pharmaceutical research and development: Novel bioanalytical chemistry merges digital microfluidics and massspectrometry

Diagnostic tests that currently direct patient therapy in cancer and other diseases are more typically performed at the genetic level, despite the fact that the beneficial response to drugs and the development of resistance are rooted in the proteins that comprise the cell’s signaling pathways. We argue that this is a major gap, as proteomics can be used to understand how cells respond to inhibitors, thereby identifying patients who are responding positively at the molecular level, as well as patients who are developing resistance through the reorganization of the cell’s signaling network. The science of quantitative proteomics is becoming increasingly more robust, sensitive, and reproducible., however translating these types of assays into non-specialist environments has remained problematic largely for technical reasons involving sample preparation and method quality control. Here, we propose to address these issues by creating an Automated Digital Microfluidic Sample Processing System for Proteomics (DMF device) that offers complete control and standardization over all processing tasks from crude biological mixtures through to a sample compatible for quantitative mass spectrometry (MS) analyses

An Innovative Approach to Enhance Scalability of Cloud Infrastructure in Multiply Regions

The proposed project will provide the resources to enhance AMPD Technologies existing cloud infrastructure and develop a scalable system that can be deployed in multiple regions. The Intern(s) will be required to search, select and present for adoption the latest methodology with developed steps, procedures and enhancements to improve the companies effectiveness in offering computing services to clients. The intern(s) will gain vast knowledge in the areas of software development and cloud computing, with experience problems solving, developing and deploying scripts to virtual machine servers. This project will provide clients of AMDP Technologies with a low energy, environmentally focused cloud based solution to support their demanding products.

Three Rivers Mi’kmaq Greenhouse Project

Supporting the organization in preparing an analysis of the feasibility of a commercial greenhouse project. The expected benefit is that the project could lead to the establishment of a social enterprise that will contribute to a food security and food sovereignty for an indigenous community.

Streamlining and Expediting Development Approvals for the City of Niagara Falls Planning

The objective of a this project is to focus on key long range policy projects and on expediting development approvals within the City of Niagara Falls. A Planning Student Intern will provide planning-based knowledge and assistance to the City of Niagara Falls Planning staff in the Policy and Current Planning groups of the department. The City of Niagara Falls is initiating a new Official Plan and will kick off a new Secondary Plan this year for the municipality, the intern will research and prepare guidance documents to assist in this initiative.