Innovative Projects Realized

Marketing Strategy Internship

This project involves developing strategies and actionable recommendations to support CP Business Solutions Inc. in transitioning its client base. As part of its long-term growth strategy, CP Business Solutions Inc. aims to work with medium and large enterprises and organizations.

To achieve its goal, CP Business Solutions Inc. has selected a number of possible clients for which it may deliver recommendations and solutions focused on marketing strategy and document development. Since CP is currently at full capacity with existing clients, the organization must consider ways to deliver strategic projects and grow revenue within its existing clients by providing high-value services.

Designing of a rehabilitation task for virtual reality combined to a robotic training to improve arm motor recovery in chronic stroke survivors

Individuals that survive a stroke are left with long-term movement impairment at the affected arm that negatively
impact their performance in daily activities. Robotic arm devices and virtual reality can help improve recovery
following a stroke, and the optimal VR game needs to be challenging, adaptable and reflecting as closely as
possible reality to support participants’ engagement and positive training response. However, VR games
commercially available are often not tailored to meet the specific needs of individuals with a stroke. Hence, the
goal of this project is to design a virtual reality game that will closely reproduce real-life daily tasks (e.g. grocery
shopping task) with an adaptable environment that will make possible training of individuals with various levels of
motor impairment at the arm. Overall, this project will allow improving training therapy and support recovery poststroke.

Management practices for growing a forest in a post-mining industrial landscape

Coal-fired power companies in Alberta need to conduct afforestation of thousands of hectares of previously mined lands, as the province transitions from coal-fired to gas-fired power plants. Identification of management practices that address soil building, erosion control and manage ruderal vegetation concurrently is critical to facilitate reclamation efforts. This study will implement an integrated set of beneficial management practices (BMPs) and provide a basis for quantifying the value of these practices for facilitating soil building, erosion control, and weed management in former mine sites. We will test these management practices with three field studies of similar environmental conditions at two different coal mines (Genesee and SunHills) owned by Capital Power and TransAlta Corp., respectively, in the Parkland region of Alberta. The management practice changes developed will benefit our industrial partners

Financial Modeling based on Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Processing

Financial variables modelling plays an essential role in computational finance and risk management. Recent research has shown that public sentiment and other information expressed in the natural text such as news articles are important factors correlated with financial variables. The main purpose of this project is to better model financial variables such as market indices and credit spreads. To achieve this, we plan to develop different machine learning models that allow the modelling of these different financial variables based on cutting-edge sentiment analysis and other advanced natural language processing algorithms applied to public online texts. This internship project with its industry partner, a financial risk management software provider, plans to investigate comprehensive financial modelling techniques that incorporate natural language processing techniques such as sentiment analysis. The intern will work specifically on developing and tuning different machine learning models to better explain and predict the dynamics of financial variables interested.

Application of a Surface Fouling Sensor for Predictive Maintenance of a Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger System

Heat exchangers, used in building heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to transfer heat from hot to cold fluids, are designed to operate under ideal conditions. However, in practice operating conditions may vary with ambient temperature or humidity. HVAC system efficiency can be improved significantly if fluid flow rates are adjusted in response to such changes. Armstrong Fluid Technology is a Canadian firm that has developed control systems to adjust the flow through building heat exchangers to maximize their efficiency. This project is being undertaken to optimize a heat exchanger system. The feedback control system and predictive maintenance module will reduce the energy required for operating an HVAC system by approximately 30% and have a significant impact on Canada’s energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Effective Algorithms in Polyhedral Geometry and Symbolic Analysis

The proposed research projects will expand the scope of computer algebra systems (CAS) into two areas where much remains to be done: symbolic analysis and polyhedral geometry. One of the proposed research projects will also strengthen CAS in one of their well-established territory, namely symbolic integration. These themes will support applications such as the analysis, transformation and scheduling of computer programs as well as the computation of limits of families of geometrical objects (e.g. tangent cones) algebraic geometry. This proposal capitalizes on the research conducted by academic partners at the University of Western Ontario in order to strengthen and extend the technology of their industrial partner, Maplesoft, the developers of Maple, one of the leading CAS world-wide

Green logistics planning for hydrogen fuel network: a life cycle analysis approach

The energy sector accounts for 75% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By adopting a low-carbon or clean fuel alternative, we can reduce GHG emissions to a great extent. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been identified as a major opportunity to reduce GHG emissions compared to fossil fuels, yet the distribution of hydrogen remains a challenge due to multiple processes involved in the distribution and production of green hydrogen from methanol, Azolla Hydrogen is an organization that accelerates the adoption of clean fuels and has technology that uses methanol as the hydrogen carrier which generates hydrogen, on-demand, at the local level, circumventing many of the logistical challenges. Thus, an optimal resource planning by analyzing the life-cycle inputs, outputs, and distribution models to provide recommendations for Azolla to support their hydrogen fueling stations in Alberta, and/or California can create a successful industrial example that strides towards a more sustainable, circular carbon economy.

ESG Events Clustering using Natural Language Processing

The integration of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into investment decisions has accelerated in the last few years. In fact, Bank of America estimates a $20 trillion of asset growth in ESG funds over the next two decades. Evaluating ESG related events of a company is an important task to assess company ESG risk. For public companies, important changes should be covered by the media and possibly by several news. These news need to be grouped under the same ESG event before analysis. Up to now, human analysts have carried out this task manually, a time expensive task and source of possible error due to a large number of text data. The goal of this research is to use natural language processing (NLP) to ensure uniformity across work done by different analysts and analyze the possibility to automate the task in order to save time for future news grouping.

Investigating Crop and Soil Properties using Remote Sensing Big Data for Supporting Precision Agriculture

The Canadian agricultural sector is facing a wide range of challenges that include depleting natural resources (e.g., water), environmental pollution (e.g., fertilizers), and climate change. Precision agriculture is a method of farming that uses technologies to monitor soil and crop status and support timely and variable-rate farming practices. It is thus a promising approach to address challenges faced by the agricultural sector. Remote sensing (e.g., drone- and satellite-based imaging) is an essential technology in precision agriculture, which is capable of identifying within-field soil and crop variability and detecting crop stresses (e.g., water and nutrient shortages), providing critical information to perform site-specific management. In this project, interns will utilize cutting-edge remote sensing techniques and innovative models for investigating soil and crop properties. The partner organizations will be able to use the research results for precision agriculture and improve the efficiency and environmental sustainability of farming practices.

Simulating CANDU 6 Core ConfigurationsOperating on the Thorium Fuel Cycle

OVERVIEW MISSING

The research goal of this internship is to develop various configurations of the CANDU 6™ reactor core fuelled with thorium to achieve a conversion ratio of at least one, (i.e. the reactor produces as much fissile material as it consumes). These cores should have equivalent power outputs as the baseline reactor, but achieve higher average discharge burnup. The utilization of thorium allows the exploitation of a currently unused energy source and more efficient usage of uranium fuel. Secondary benefits include the reduction of the workload of the fuelling machines and the demonstration of the robustness of the CANDU design.

Research and Development in Helical Steel Pile Heat Exchangers

Helical steel piles are commonly used structural elements that anchor building foundations deep in the soil. Recently, it has been demonstrated that they can be used as ground heat exchangers with ground source heat pumps (GSHPs). These dual use geo-piles (structural and thermal) have the potential to significantly reduce GSHP installation costs, leading to greater adoption of sustainable energy technology. A potential application of geo-pile heat exchangers has been identified in the remote Canadian North. Many building foundations have been weakened due to thawing permafrost associated with climate change. Geo-piles may have the potential to provide sustainable heating to buildings in northern communities, while simultaneously drawing heat out of the ground, helping to delay or remediate melting permafrost destabilization. This research seeks a detailed understanding of the operational principles and optimization methods of geo-piles and to evaluate their potential for combined heating and ground stabilization in northern Canadian regions.

Economic Benefit of Recreation in Manitoba – A provincial capacity building project

In this project, two students from the Master of Arts in Applied Economics program will calculate the economic value and impact of the recreation sector in Manitoba. Their report will provide an evidence base from which Recreation Manitoba and its clients can decide on recreation initiatives with the highest economic return on investment. This information can in turn be used in Recreation Manitoba’s funding proposals for public and private granting bodies. To the extent that the economic benefits of recreation are high in Manitoba, and increased funding is forthcoming for the sector, this project may spur increased economic development and well-being in Manitoba.