Innovative Projects Realized

Workforce Planning Project

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions to the job market. Employment services organisations, including Kingston Economic Development Corporation (our partner organisation), indicate that the growth of businesses and economic activity is seriously hampered by the inability to hire qualified employees. To alleviate the mismatch between demand and supply in the labour market, it is imperative to develop the ability to (a) rapidly detect trends, such as shifting demands in specific regions or types of jobs, or new types of positions or skills, and (b) better communicate to job seekers accurate information about the skills and jobs in demand, to facilitate their rapid reskilling. The purpose of this project is to create a platform enabling the regular and rapid analysis of job demand data scraped from various online databases already in place. The platform will enable answering the following questions: What skills are employers in Kingston and Eastern Ontario looking for? What skills do the jobseekers in Kingston and Eastern Ontario have? Where can the skills be found and where are they needed? What rapid skills development opportunities are available to job seekers that will quickly align them with the needs of the job market?

Digitalisation de la fourniture des services pour la relance économique de DSI

Digitalisation de la fourniture des services pour la relance économique de DSI

Mitacs Business Strategy Internship – Haven Family Connections Inc. Accounting & Finance Support

Haven Family Connections Inc is changing its accounting and finance processes, which they believe will entail many activities for my internship. As the tasks that they listed, they will require the intern to fill out paperwork regarding changes to their processes, reconciliations, and descriptions of accounting policies. The organization will be wanting data transfer as they go from a paper filing process to digital, which will help the company prepare and present their financial information better for donors and managers.

At the end of this internship there will be a final report and presentation defining the skill enhancements and deliverables of the internship will be presented to the academic supervisor.

Intern: Finance, Admin and HR

Creating organizational policies for sustainable growth

The role of this project is to work with teams within the organization in the creation and development of internal frameworks, processes, procedures and systems. The project will cover the development and implementation of policies and procedures covering three business areas: Finance, HR and IT. As a startup that is facing rapid growth and demand of services, the development and implementation of these policies will provide a foundation for sustainable growth in the business. Furthermore, the organization will have the ability to better communicate its mission and values to its employees and external stakeholders. This will help with employee engagement and accountability and will help build transparency and trust within the organization.

Strategy sales & marketing intern

Given my experience in the oil & gas and mining sector, I wanted to enhance my skills in process optimization and analysis. The internship provides an opportunity for me to understand the field of AI and machine learning and take the ideas to customers in the oil & gas and particularly mining sector. Additionally, the internship enhances my sales and marketing skills and allows me to create a marketing plan from scratch for customers that are applicable to NTWIST technologies. The internship has enhanced my understanding of utilization of modern technologies to design efficient operational processes for the mining sector.

Aligo Innovation

Le projet permettra à Aligo Innovation d’identifier des pistes de solutions sous forme de scénarios. Voici les principales tâches liées au projet :
– Déterminer quelles sont les utilités possibles de la technologie ?
– Participer à des rencontres de planifications avec les chercheurs, le consultant et le directeur innovations
sociales.
– Recherche de données secondaires afin d’établir une liste élargie d’utilisations possibles de la
technologie.
– Produire des comptes-rendus des travaux de recherches.
– Processus de sélection afin de déterminer les secteurs les plus porteurs
– Étoffer le profil des meilleures opportunités
Le stagiaire sera également appelé à faire des recherches pour évaluer le marché de d’autres technologies selon les demandes
des universités. Les projets envisagés sont :
• La réalité virtuelle pour la formation des étudiants en sciences infirmières
• Un programme de formation en ligne pour les professeurs des écoles professionnelles

Pattern classification of flow limited breathing via acoustic and vibrationmeasurements

Snoring during sleep is common and is sometimes indicative of a mechanical impediment to breathing. The condition, called high upper airway resistance, is thought to be relatively common affecting roughly 15% of the population. It is characterized by complaints of daytime fatigue and/or sleepiness and is associated with a myriad of disastrous effects on a patient’s health such as high blood pressure, depression, atrial fibrillation, migraine, bruxism, temporal-mandibular joint disorders, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. The exact incidence of HUAR is unknown with the majority of patients undiagnosed and left untreated. The principal reason for this is the lack of a convenient, non-invasive method for making the diagnosis of HUAR. The proposed research will use a complex analysis of snoring sound to identify the occurrence and distinguish it from simple snoring.

Stronger Together: Social Infrastructure for Community Health

The proposed research program aims to better enable the provision of digitally based self-management support programs for Canadians who live with chronic conditions that were further complicated by COVID-19. In order to accomplish this objective, this study will evaluate existing self-management programs for adults with chronic conditions and curate condition specific evidence-based content that will be provided through the Curatio platform. The project will also evaluate the success of the program through metrics obtained through the platform data as well as evaluating patients experiences with the program. This project will not only be beneficial to Curatio by expanding the content of the platform as well as their patient database, but to healthcare providers in general as it can be accessed by organizations to offer digital evidence-based support to their patients who live with complex chronic conditions.

Determination of the effects of rock mass parameters on the erosion ofunlined dam spillways based on flume experiment and numerical modelling

One of the main safety concerns for dam structure is damage from the scour and erosion of rock mass downstream of spillways. Therefore, the design of dam spillways to discharge a wide-ranging quantity of water with minimum rock mass scour, is one of the most important issues in designing hydraulic structures that consider the energy dissipation of water and its erosion power. In order to ensure the sustainability of their hydraulic structures, Hydro- Québec and Uniper from Sweden have joined efforts to develop a reliable method to assess the hydraulic erodibility of the bedrock at spillways. This will allow, on the one hand, to better protect the security of the surrounding population and the environment, and on the other hand, to ensure the production of hydroelectricity which is a very important part of energy used in Quebec.

Preventing and Responding to Gendered Violence on Campus: A Study of Policies & Practices at Canadian Universities

The purpose of the research is to describe the nature of university policies and practices related to gendered violence at Canadian universities, in order to identify promising practices for preventing and responding to gendered violence. A description and analysis of university policies from across Canada will provide a useful context for evaluating the policies on gendered violence at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) and the University of Waterloo (UW), specifically for identifying gaps and effective practices. The research aims to provide SASC with an evidence base to inform future program development and collaborative work with WLU and UW.

Population study of First Nations Communities and the Quebec population to determine HLA frequencies and common and rare haplotypes

The determination of HLA (Human Leukocyte Antigen) is of crucial importance for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. The wide variability of the HLA system has some progressive advantages, but can make the search for compatible donors more complex for specific populations. While populations in the regions of Quebec were characterized several years ago for the HLA system, First Nations communities were not included in this study. Lack of HLA characterization of these communities may have important clinical implications, in access to care (e.g., stem cell transplantation), but is also of interest at the anthropological level (understanding the evolutionary differences of the First Nations of Quebec).
This project will aim to estimate the differences in allele frequencies across communities. In addition to comparing HLA frequencies within First Nations communities, we will also compare those to frequencies observed in the Quebec population, as well as nationally and worldwide. This work is expected to enhance our appreciation of complexity and specificity of HLA data of the diverse population of Quebec.

Gnowit BSI-Madiha

The purpose of this internship is to develop a marketing and sale process implementing automation tools to scale the Gnowit business. This could be achieved by applying strategies based on effective digital marketing, prospecting, account management and customer care.