Innovative Projects Realized

EERS – Optimizing market viability of advanced in-ear technologies

EERS Global conceives and develops advanced in-ear technologies to accelerate the go-to-market phase of game-changing products such as advanced hearing protection & communication devices. A big challenge for EERS is to understand the trends in the newly labelled hearable industry, to build a bridge between these trends and its own research initiatives, and to commercialize its intellectual properties. This project aims at helping EERS identify target original equipment manufacturers using or interested in in-ear devices/technologies and to find potential business partners.

Improve client user experience to increase access to industry technical findings in intellectual property.

In 20 years, CEATI has accumulated a large volume of highly detailed and industry leading intellectual property in the form of topic-specific technical reports and benchmarking studies. We would like to modernize the portfolio of content and diversify the ‘form factors’ to improve the usability of the key technical findings (training presentations, implementation guides, etc.) in a digital environemnt. We will be modernizing our client facing portal in parallel to enhance the CEATI user experience through improved user experience.

The objective of the project is to provide an updated client Web platform with a robust set of standardized content forms that maximize our clients’ ability to find and implement the best practices outlined in our research.

What is the innovation or incremental innovation to be developed (i.e., business model, product or process development/improvement, service delivery, etc.)?

1. Updated product design to help find and deliver the right engineering answers for our clients.
2. Improved service delivery, by designing experience based off key client behaviors and desired outcomes.

Applications of Tensor Neural Networks to pricing early-exercise options

An early-exercise option is a financial agreement which grants one party the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset at a pre-agreed price at a series of pre-determined times. The problem of pricing an option is of great practical importance and is typically addressed using computationally expensive numerical simulation methods. We will apply cutting edge Deep Learning techniques to address this fundamental problem. Once trained, the models we develop will be able to solve the option pricing problem in a fraction of the time taken by industry-standard classical approaches. The main contribution of our work will be to leverage Tensor Networks to alleviate the computational cost of training the models in the first place. The partner will benefit from this project by developing their software stack to tackle this commercially valuable problem.

User Traces and Adaptive App Management, within there-implementation of the FarmAtHand App

We will research ways of tracking user behavior on a mobile application, as well as being able to remotely update the application without having to update program code. Hence allowing customizations per user, and the ability to make the change at any time. The partner organization FarmAtHand will benefit by receiving a brand new mobile application with many improvements and added features.

Standardizing processes for customer support experience

RetinaLogik Biotech Inc. is a social enterprise based out of Calgary, Alberta. We believe everyone deserves access to quality vision care: With RetinaLogik software, life-changing eye exams can be delivered on intelligent and portable devices at a fraction of the cost. As we approach our launch, we see this as excellent timing to bring on additional support to help us in mapping out our complete customer experience journey.

TouchTech Startup Project – Communitech

This project will focus on the building and rollout of a member portal to support idea and discovery stage firms who do not have a dedicated resource on the Communitech team. Our goal is to provide these founders with better navigation to resources, a deeper sense of community and access to our advisory services during office hours. We’ve selected a software platform and are now looking to build a unique environment for our founders, along with a training guide and a rollout and adoption plan. A full business case for the selection solution can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eu-804l_Au3wd4KuOy1ngpJiLIN5uNIfmfomvvTDqF4/edit?usp=sharing

Vish Limited / Vish Limitee – Customer Onboarding Analytics Project

This specific project includes bringing on a MUN business intern with a Customer Success focus. The focus of this project is to assess our customer onboarding and to find ways for operational improvements and innovation. There is a need for analysis of our data to ensure we are going about it properly as we scale. We require someone with the business knowledge and analytical skills to ensure all newly acquired customers are onboarded onto our platform smoothly and are trained to 1) use the software and 2) understand how to read the data extracted throughout the salon in order to make strategic decisions, recommendations, implement changes to increase salon productivity and the bottom line.

This project would foster additional analysis and result in innovative strategic recommendations to ensure our customer onboarding is effective as we scale globally.

Bounce Health Innovation – International MedTech Innovation Exchange

Bounce has a number of incubating companies in our portfolio who are interested in developing relationships with stakeholders in the UK and ultimately developing and executing a go-to-market strategy for market entry. Bounce Partner Companies are Canadian companies operating in the medtech and digital health sector and as such, a potential relationship with the UK is very valuable given the relevant similarities between the UK and Canadian state-funded health care systems and procurement models. The 6 companies do not have in-house marketing and business development expertise. They need business interns who have the knowledge, expertise and innovative ideas on how to develop relationships in the UK market to fuel their growth.

Six Memorial University undergraduate business students have been selected who have expertise and interest in working with the 6 innovative health tech companies. Each student will be matched with a health tech company. The interns will have the opportunity to work directly with emerging leaders in a growing and thriving technical industry as they build a direct connection with a beachhead international market.

ProNotes Internship

The summer internship student will be responsible for computing, presenting, and performing the verification of the design of the design. Prior to being able to test the usability of the application the signal processing feature must be developed so that it is deployable on a mobile device that first obtains the raw data from the devices microphone in the form of a signal, converts that signal to a fraction of a note, and displays that note to the user in real-time. Following successful runs on the verification data, usability testing will be used to assess whether to proceed to the next step in the verification or refine certain aspects of the design.

At present, ProNotes has developed a propriety technology for integrating this component of the technology into the full framework of the application. The challenges presented are for developing the testing, testing criteria, de-bugging, and improving the existing technology so that it can be used by real world music students for tracking vocalized music.

Conception d’un outil intelligent, chatbot, capable de valider des auprès des utilisateurs des changements de comportement financiers

Le projet consiste à aider un partenaire à développer un coach de bien-être financier. Ce produit, qui prend la forme d’une application mobile, sert à guider ses utilisateurs à atteindre des objectifs financiers.
L’objectif du projet est de concevoir un chatbot intelligent, capable de valider auprès des utilisateurs des changements de comportement financiers.
L’application doit être en mesure de détecter des changements dans la vie de l’utilisateur qui pourraient affecter leurs objectifs financiers. Le coach financier, sous forme de chatbot, permet d’effectuer un suivi des changements de comportements auprès de l’utilisateur.

New Brunswick Rural Housing Data

The New Brunswick Non-Profit Housing Association (NBNPHA) represents 180 non-profit and co-op housing organizations. The NBNPHA provides fee for service consulting to help develop rejuvenation, renovation, and new build projects. Services include writing funding proposals, project management, building design, and construction owner’s representative.

With this project, interns will create a housing data and asset map of important rental data information from 26 rural communities around New Brunswick to provide vital information for NBNPHA’s projects, required in grant proposals with CMHC about the state of availability and rising costs of rental units in NB.

Integrating autonomously recorded audio data with traditional field surveys to improve detectability estimates for North American birds

Around the world, birds have been declining at an alarming rate. It is therefore important that conservationists use as many resources as they can when making informed conservation decisions. Autonomous recording units (ARUs) have become an increasingly popular choice for monitoring bird populations, because they can be left in highly remote regions (such as Canada’s Boreal Forest) and automatically record birds throughout their breeding season. The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) is a national leader in ARU research, and have collected thousands of data points across Canada for hundreds of birds. This project will seek to synthesize these ARU datasets collected by ABMI and improve previous estimates of detectability, which allow for conservation managers to decide exactly where and when to monitor. By improving monitoring decisions, the limited budgets set out for conservation can be more efficiently spent year after year.