Innovative Projects Realized

Susgrainable Health Foods Inc. Internship

Susgrainable is in the midst of a business pivot away from food service and into consumer-packaged goods. This has involved the team creating an online shop amongst other initiatives. The team has recently lost 2 founding members due to a massive economic contraction within the food service space. The team is looking for students to assist with helping re-organize the company for both investment and onboarding of new team members in the future.

Financial Analyst

As one of the market leaders in the eCommerce space in the US, Cymax Group has experienced elevated growth, and more recently a step-change increase in volume that can be attributed to COVID-19. As part of the company’s strategy to drive sustainable growth in this new industry dynamics, the engagement of an intern will contribute to ensuring proper triangulation of thought leadership, building of Latest Estimate (LE) models, as well as playing an integral role in collaborating with stakeholders in building out the 3-5 year financial plan.

Marketing & UXUI Assistant Internship

Excelar Technologies is a product development consultancy with expertise in big data privacy, and web applications. We are currently preparing for a product launch for Chatnels, an AI-supported chat platform, working with other companies to help reduce waiting room contact in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. With my interest in both marketing and UXUI design, I’m fascinated by the perspectives and skill-sets required to communicate effectively to bring products to life. Building on top of previous experiences in product development, a fast-paced startup environment is the ideal place to further my skills on meaningful projects that will make an impact.

Élaboration du plan opérationnel de Dialogue NB.

Élaboration et rédaction du plan d’affaires :
S’appuyant sur le nouveau plan stratégique de Dialogue NB adopté en février dernier, l’étudiant sera demandé de rédiger un plan d’affaires pour opérationnaliser les axes stratégiques et pour permettre à l’organisation d’atteindre une viabilité financière d’ici 3 ans. L’équipe de Dialogue détient déjà des informations ainsi que des idées de produits commercialisables et des différents marchés à desservir, ce qui orientera le travail de l’étudiant. Ce plan permettra à l’organisme de se positionner pour des octrois qui seront disponibles à l’automne et de procéder à quelques tests dans le marché. Il sera attendu à la fin du stage que l’étudiant livrera un plan d’affaires adressant l’atteinte de la viabilité financière de l’organisation

Élaboration et rédaction d’un plan opérationnel pour adresser la situation
Avec l’appui de l’équipe, l’étudiant sera demandé de dresser une analyse des besoins et des écarts afin d’assurer la livraison de nos programmes clés dans le contexte causé par la Covid-19 (ou toute autres futures situations d’urgence) et détaillerait entre autres comment assurer la livraison des services lorsque la province est en phase rouge, orange et jaune. Au-delà de notre capacité à migrer la livraison de nos services virtuellement.

Modeling Aerosol Dispersion in Dental Offices

The Ontario Dental Association requires the time of three hours between two clients in a dental office to prevent the transmission of COVID-19; however, this strict guideline poses a great challenge to the economics of dental business and the recovery of Ontario economy. The results of this study will help understand the COVID-19 transmission in dental offices and help develop technologies for the proper control of aerosols and splatters generated during the dental procedures. Dispersion and removal of aerosols generated from a specific dental operation will be modelled to understand how aerosol disperses and transports in the facility. The partner organization provides consultancy and professional training in filtration and separation technologies, clean air technologies. The proposed CFD modeling work will provide relevant guidance on product development for occupational health protection during pandemics, and help the company sustain its technical consulting services to dental office industry, in and out of Ontario.

Investigation of adverse effects and healing factor properties of a novel formulation from Blue-O Medical Technology

The appearance of multidrug resistance of pathogens is
challenging the researcher and industrial communities to develop more efficacious
antimicrobial treatments. Blue-O Technology Incorporation (Blue-O Tech) has developed
a novel formulation of medicine that accelerates the wound healing, while having an
excellent antimicrobial strength over a broad spectrum of pathogens. The objectives of
this study are to evaluate the cytotoxic effects, the immunological response, and the
healing properties of this novel medicine prior to its marketing and commercialization.

Human Resources Assistant

Berrymobile is a marketing and distribution company for local fruit. They have been around for 20 years and are a seasonal business from late May to early September. As the Human Resources Assistant I am responsible for all the seasonal fruit stand and driver employee hiring for the lower mainland and whistler, scheduling, assisting with payroll, OHS programming, writing weekly newsletters, creating an employee manual/handbook and any other duties that are assigned to me.

Strategic Business Assessment – Nautel Limited

As Nautel develops new products for its core markets, the company is also weighing its options to develop products which can take the company into new markets. This is an important decision for Nautel as the company must then determine where to allocate and invest the company’s finite engineering capacity. This project will carry out Nautel’s need for strategic assessments of various opportunities, including whether or not the company should transform its current business model. Presently operating with a direct sale of manufactured products model, Nautel focuses heavily on customer support. Based on the existing market environment, this model alone seems unsustainable. Therefore, this project will also assess whether it is in Nautel’s best strategic interest to incorporate the delivery of subscription services supported by Nautel products as well as Nautel technical capabilities.

Advancing Climate-mediated Wetland Assessment and Change Detection using Earth Observation Data Fusion and Advanced Analytics

Quantifying the current extent of wetlands and how they have changed over the last number of years is important for understanding how wetland ecosystem services (including flood mitigation, food services, and migrating bird habitats) are sensitive to climate change. In this project, we will work with the partner organization to develop accurate methods for wetland identification and areal coverage using satellite and airborne remotely sensed data. The methods will be evaluated by the Mitacs Intern using ecological data collected at numerous boreal and parkland wetlands. In addition to this, the Mitacs Intern will quantify how wetlands are changing and the combined environmental characteristics that may make wetlands sensitive to climatic changes. The methods developed during this Mitacs internship will enable the partner organization to develop state-of-the-art methods for wetland characterization and monitoring, which are expected to increase revenue streams and continued collaboration with future industry partners.

Pattern classification of flow limited breathingvia acoustic measurements

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 day1ime
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.

Implementation of an Optimal System for the Detection and Avoidancesystem on an Unmanned Aircraft System

Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) will be essential in developing and monitoring Canada’s territories. This is in part due to a lack of suitable human pilots due to skill shortages and difficult conditions making recruitment difficult; there are also “dull, dirty and dangerous” aspects of the missions that make a remote pilot operation safer. Miniaturization, machine learning and robotics are all fields which may contribute to overcoming these challenges in new and affordable ways. In this research project, we propose to research and implement an obstacle avoidance system which allows the unmanned aircraft to detect and avoid flying obstacles using an air-to-air radar setup.

Modeling Ekona’s H2 production and carbon capture process

Ekona Power Inc is developing a technology to convert natural gas into H2, electricity and a pure CO2 stream. The CO2 stream will them be removed using underground carbon sequestration. Their approach uses two processes. The first uses pyrolysis to convert natural gas to hydrogen and solid carbon. The second uses a fuel cell to convert the solid carbon to a pure CO2 stream. This proposal concerns the first process.
Ekona is currently finalizing the design of pyrolysis unit and preparing for the pilot scale testing. However Ekona doesn’t have expertise in the detailed chemical kinetic modeling the pyrolysis of natural gas which includes the formation of solid carbon particles. The Thomson Lab at the University of Toronto has over a decade of experience in developing and validating models of hydrocarbon pyrolysis and carbon particle formation. The proposed modeling approach will allow Ekona to better understand its pyrolysis design and anticipate the performance of the prototype unit.