Innovative Projects Realized

Research and Recommendation of Best Practices For Hybrid Work And Automation of Human Resources Tasks – AltaML

AltaML is growing, improving its culture, making changes in its processes and systems to manage its growth as well as the creation and growth of its joint ventures, while adjusting to a hybrid work model. With the organization scaling and increasing its opportunities there also comes a higher demand on the Business Operations side of the organization which includes the People Team. Much of the HR support we provide is needing improvements or start to be implemented. In addition, we are looking for support in general Human Resources and facilities tasks. The role for the intern would have a general theme of enhancing the employee experience.

The benefits to AltaML would include the support, improvement and implementation of needed processes and services that have a direct impact on our Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) which impacts all cultural aspects of the company.

Communication Enhancement Project

The project that Wolseley Family Place is working on is called Communication Enhancement Project. Wolseley Family Place will be embarking on some re-branding, and streamlining their communication content (brochures, posters, signage in the resource centre, website, facebook). This project will look at venues of communicating to the wider community to enhance their program promotion and bring more families through the doors. This may include social media content creation, creating posters to email to networks, physically delivering handbills to neighborhood households, etc. The project will also include spending time ensuring consistent graphics, colours, and logos throughout the current communication documents and applying a critical eye to the written content to ensure that it is communicating well. The student will be able to work from the centre in person but will also be able to work from home, in a hybrid model as determined by supervisor.

Because Wolseley Family Place moved locations in 2019 right before the pandemic hit, they have had a harder time reaching out to their new community to announce their programs and services and get more people through the door.

Escouade Numérique – Développement d’une stratégie de marketing Web pour la génération de demande d’entreprises désirant optimiser leur performance globale au niveau numérique.

L’Escouade Numérique est un OSBL ayant pour mission d’alphanumériser nos belles entreprises québécoises en contribuant à leur croissance et en améliorant leur rentabilité. Nous souhaitons à travers cette plateforme offrir une tribune neutre où des spécialistes au sein d’entreprises établies partageront leurs conseils de manière efficace et transparente. Il s’agit d’un lieu d’entraide, où chacun participe sur une base volontaire, sans attente de visibilité ou de rentabilité. Une cinquantaine de spécialistes de différents domaines (un nombre qui augmentera dans les prochaines semaines) sont réunis ici dans le but d’aider et d’accompagner les PME québécoises dans leur transformation numérique. Le projet Mitacs s’axera autour du développement d’une stratégie de marketing Web pour la génération de demande d’entreprises désirant optimiser leur performance globale au niveau numérique.

Hey Neighbour Collective

Using a collective impact approach, Hey Neighbour Collective (HNC) brings together housing providers, non-profits, researchers, local and regional governments, housing associations and health authorities. Together with residents of multi-unit housing, our mission is to experiment with and learn about ways of alleviating loneliness and social isolation while building capacity for neighbourly support and mutual aid. Interns will gain experience in professional program evaluation and be able to compare this approach to research to a more academic social science research approach. The intensive social component of these internships will also offer valuable network-growing benefits to the intern within the expanding domain of the urban housing professional sector in BC.

Interactive Broadcast Platform

Cya Inc. is a Toronto-based company that is creating communal experiences around content for a modern digitized world. Our mission is to make digital interaction a seamless experience. Movie theater attendance has been falling prior to the pandemic. Only 14% of people were found to go to movie theaters one or more times a month according to a Statista survey of people in the United States in June 2019. In turn, studios have been suffering due to an inability to reach Gen Z as well as they used to reach previous generations. Cya Live offers an interactive experience catered to the new way we rapidly consume content. With a recent shift towards virtual communication, Cya Live bridges the gap that exists when it comes to creating meaningful experiences in an online environment. We make real-time interaction possible for large groups and broadcast scenarios.
Cya’s platform, “Cya Live,” is the world’s first interactive, multi-way live events platform for virtual engagement with large audiences. Cya Live facilitates a multifaceted viewing experience by letting audiences interact with live content, other users, and hosts through video, audio, and text, and use social media—all in full synchronicity.

Scotiabank HRSS Operational Efficiency Enhancement

The increased demand for reliable and useful human resource information has pushed the subject to the top of the practitioners’ agenda. Accordingly, human resource and capital management is also one of Scotiabank’s core priorities. As an ever-growing multinational company that employs a large number of employees, human resource information reporting is a vital service for Scotiabank for ensuring good decisions in talent management. Yet, there is no standardization in the workflow to integrate request intake for data and reports, causing delays in request handling. This internship will tie into a research to improve request intake process, assist prioritization of information services workflow, identify the most widely-needed human resource information and services together with HR clients, and present the HR analytic metrics result to HR clients and partners. The goal is to help Scotiabank translate its company-wide HR and workforce data into workable insights that it can use and share with its business leaders.

Career Trek WOW Summer Camp

Career Trek is a non-profit organization that seeks to connect kids to oppurtunities and experiences that can develop life long interests and passions. Through school and post-secondary partnerships Career Trek introduces children from ages 10 to 12 to different experiences simulating possible career paths and oppurtunities. The Wonders of Work camp focuses specifically on exposing the participants to ‘days on the job’, through exercises and activities that introduce them to the working world. Through the worshops provided by Career Trek, these students get to interact with their peers and develop skills that will help them in their future endevors, like their education and work oppurtuites. Career trek aims to create a learning environment that is accessible to kids of all backgrounds to learn and grow. What we are looking to get from this project as an outcome is a plan of milestones, budgets, outcomes, etc. of the entire planning and project process, alongside a report of the operations, challenges, and decisions made in
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Business Strategy Internship
Proposal Template
running the program. My role, besides in helping plan and run the camp, will be also focusing on the creation of a business process of sorts.

Understanding design principles of music and health care education as interdisciplinary field and developing an online education program: a qualitative study

How can we bring better co-design into on-line Learning Design practice? How can co-design foster creativity and collaboration for adult online learning education?
Co-design has been used to create solutions for some of the most challenging problems we face in society. Government and public policy, community, healthcare and human services have all made use of the principles, processes and practical tools co-design can bring, creating a legacy of research and toolkits to learn from and apply. In education, we see examples in initiatives involving students as partners, co-design applied in learning transformation initiatives with staff and students, and collaborations involving teachers, industry experts, students, technical experts, media experts and learning designers to create new courses and programs.
The year 2020 changed our educational landscape dramatically, as institutions were forced to move courses online due to lockdowns caused by the COVID19 pandemic (Kimmel et al., 2020). In this situation, the reason to go online was different from the usual scaling up and making educational offerings accessible to broader audiences. As courses that were not initially designed for remote instruction were forced to go online, unanticipated difficulties arose (Serhan, 2020).

Plenty Canada Water Management System (Continued)

Development and oversight of an integrated water and waste management system including rainwater harvesting, grey water reuse for toilet flushing and irrigation, vertical and horizontal flow constructed wetland for septic treatment paired with outdoor composting toilets for seasonal use, and permaculture landscaping for passive rainwater retention. Upon completion, ongoing testing and monitoring procedures will be developed and implemented to collect data on rainwater harvesting, constructed wetland effluent, and composting toilet finish material.

Reflections on the rights of Canada’s Indigenous peoples: A quest for environmental justice

This study asserts that the Indian Act among others are the root causes for the persistent violation of indigenous peoples’ socio-cultural and environmental rights in Canada. They experience systemic marginalization including, environmental injustice, unsafe drinking water, inadequate housing, healthcare and basic services, land and natural resources and the freedom to practice their cultures. Their traditional practices and cultural heritage like the Indian festival and the powwow, the wearing of indigenous regalia, hunting of traditional foods, fishing and other cultural gatherings which allows them to retain their identity and traditional ways of life were outlawed. The study argues that although Canada is well known for its human rights diplomacy and globally recognized as the ‘banner holder’ of human rights however, adequately addressing the human rights of its indigenous people remains challenging especially regarding the right to a healthy environment that includes among others, the right to clean water and sanitation.

Testing and Verification of Deep Neural Network

In AI safety, compliance ensures that a model adheres to operational specifications at runtime to avoid adverse events for the end user. This proposal looks at increasing the suite of compliance testing and verification tools available to ML practitioners by implementing two more tools, CGDTest and Goose. The overall goal is to develop both proposed tools to be flexible in real-world applications, and the tools can be evaluated by submitting to an annual competition for neural networks verification (VNN-COMP). VNNCOMP is a highly recognized competition often used as a benchmark for testing and verification algorithms in the community. Real-world applications for such tools include their usage in ML model validation pipelines to minimize operational and reputational risk when deploying ML models in production in large financial institutions.

Optimization of Long-Term Planning of Mining Operations

To determine the infrastructure and their equipment needs throughout the life of a mine, mining companies solves a long-term planning problem that aims at determining the mining sequences that will maximize the net present value of profits while taking into account operational constraints. These problems are very difficult to solve because of their huge size. Furthermore, various types of uncertainties (e.g., on prices, deadlines, activity durations) should be considered. In this project, the intern will develop various mathematical optimization models and methods to solve these problems that will allow to compute near-optimal mining sequences in reasonable computing times. The expected benefit for the partner organization will be an increase in operational productivity which will translate in a market share increase by offering better competitive sale prices to their customers.