Innovative Projects Realized

A Model-Driven Framework for Meta-Data Harmonization in Business Intelligence

Datasets obtained from different sources are often heterogeneous: they do not share a common internal structure, even though they are nominally about the same subject matter. This makes reporting against datasets difficult without laborious, manual efforts to clean and transform the data. This project will investigate the feasibility of an approach to abstract the harvesting of metadata from multiple content generated Business Intelligence (BI) reporting systems. The interns will leverage previous work on model-driven engineering tools and meta-data harmonization to create a generic application framework for systematic, automated, meta-data harmonization to support business intelligence reporting. This will allow business analysts and researchers to flexibly define BI reports that integrate data from many different data sources in a much more efficient manner. This will enable Mark 3 Research Inc. to develop and market new and improved tools and products for this market space.

Bow Valley Innovations Carbon Capture Technology

Using solids to trap carbon dioxide is an alternative to the conventional and expensive solution based method. The Shimizu group at the University of Calgary has developed an outstanding candidate solid for CO2 capture from flue gas streams based on laboratory studies. This proposal will expand the experience of three interns to bridge science to process and system level engineering while offering expanded professional experience through networking with Bow Valley Innovations, the patent licensee, and their partners.

Development of an Intelligent Mobile Personal Emergency Response Systems and Vital sign monitoring – Phase 2

Epic Safety is the research and development arm of Aban Security Systems Ltd., specializing in Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) and Tele-Health. To continue its innovations, the company is planning to grow its technical and manufacturing presence in Canada. As this is a highly specialized technical field, Epic has faced challenges in hiring the highly qualified personnel to further advance its technology, and hence, is working with Dr. Golnaraghi. The envisioned Mobile PERS includes a combination of sensors to record a user’s movement/activities and vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate etc.). A processor will be in communication with various sensors to intelligently monitor a user’s motion to determine if a notable event (such as a fall or a health problem) has occurred. In this proposal, the SFU team will look at design of the sensory system and testing the proof of concept to ensure its reliability of measurements.

Transitioning from a non-profit to a financially self-sufficient business model: Pathways, barriers, and strategies for bc211

bc211 is a non-profit organization that seeks to change its business model in the face of decreasing availability of traditional funding sources and increasing demand for its services. The research project will identify and assess various alternatives in which dual objectives can be met. Using mixed methods approaches and financial planning tools, this project will aim to develop a comprehensive plan. The project would serve as a valuable source for bc211’s future directions. From the student intern’s perspective, the project will offer unique research insights on characteristics of business model transitioning in the social service sector, an area that remains understudied. Additionally, the project offers significant professional development opportunities for the intern.

Research on cross platform mobile development

Project title: Research on cross platform mobile development

Sponsor or Orgnazition: WebTech Wireless Inc.

Supervisor: Qianping Gu

Intern: Maryam Hamidirad

The WebTech Wireless Company plans to provide vehicular management services on different mobile platforms. More specifically, the company is interested to explore different features of the web-based application to be run on mobile devices and also find methodologies to integrate the development platform of the vehicular management applications into different mobile platforms. We intend to explore different cross-platform methodologies and finding the optimal methodology based on the constraints of mobile platforms and fleet management systems.

PlaceSpeak

The purpose of this internship is to assess the commercial viability of PlaceSpeak, which is creating a new online e-commerce model, and creating a new service category. This will involve extensive research into current methodologies and best practices for eliciting and collecting public policy input from community residents, as well as current pricing models and levels for profit-driven organizations that collect and provide such information. Market analysis will be conducted to indentfy and analysis potential markets and users for this new online service. Further research into current pricing levels and pricing structures for comparable online services, we can determine what is the most usable, appealing and competitive pricing model for the PlaceSpeak Issues Platform. The goal is to ensure the long-term financial viability of PlaceSpeak, which aims to implement online community participation tools that will aid in public policy decision-making.

Species tree inference from multi-labeled gene trees

Reconstructing the tree of life, which depicts the evolutionary history of today’s existing species, has been a central goal of evolutionary biology ever since Darwin. Each species is composed of a set of genes, which can be grouped into families. The DNA sequences of genes can be used to infer a gene tree for each family, and the species tree can be seen as a “summary” of these gene histories. Therefore one way of inferring a species tree is to merge multiple gene trees into a “supertree”. Many programs and software are able to combine gene trees into one, but they assume that each gene tree has at most one gene per species. However, this is unrealistic since genes undergo duplication events during the course of evolution, leading to gene trees having multiple leaves labeled by the same species. The aim of this project is to devise efficient algorithms that can combine multi-labeled gene trees and thus infer better species trees.

Développement de méthodes numériques pour l’analyse d’écoulements instationnaires en aérodynamique externe transsonique et application à l’étude du tremblement (buffet) transsonique

La mécanique des fluides numériques (CFD) occupe une place importante dans la conception des aéronefs modernes puisqu’elle permet d’explorer différents designs en environnement informatique avec un coût plus faible que les essais de soufflerie. Cependant, les phénomènes
instationnaires (variant dans le temps) requièrent un temps de calcul élevé limitant l’application de la CFD dans un cadre industriel. De ceux-ci figure le tremblement (buffet) transsonique, une interaction indésirable entre le choc sonique et la couche limite sur une aile d’avion qui entraîne
une fluctuation des forces aérodynamiques. De plus, la mécanique entourant ce phénomène demeure partiellement incomprise. Ainsi, ce projet vise à développer des méthodes d’analyse des phénomènes aérodynamiques instationnaires efficaces afin de réduire les temps de calcul
requis. Ensuite, ces méthodes seront appliquées au buffet afin de fournir une compréhension supplémentaire du phénomène.

Reconstructing DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework) compliant high level views from information systems

Information systems are critical assets for enterprises and contain important knowledge acquired over the years. Over time, as these software systems grow in scope and complexity, they introduce greater variability in design at the level of individual software components. As a result, these systems deviate from their initial architecture. The latter can no longer be used as a medium to support various activities such as the analysis and the certification of these systems. To address these shortcomings, it is mandatory to reconstruct these systems’ current architecture. For this purpose our research project aims at proposing techniques to reconstruct high-level views representing the architecture of information systems. The architectural views on which we focus are those prescribed by the DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework) specification. The outcomes of our research project will therefore provide to our partner’s architects and analysts a basis for information systems analysis and certification.

Sport-for-resilience: 4-H participation and youth lifeskill development

The current wellbeing crisis in Canada is magnified in rural areas. Also, rural economies are negatively affected by lack of suitable youth lifeskill training. Rural communities lack financial capital to address these issues on their own. 4-H has been building rural youth skill for over 100 years, offering a variety of options, including physical activities which occur on farms such as horse activity. For rural youth, there is potential for 4-H physical activity programs to be sport-for-development- a field combining physical activity and lifeskill development. However, over the years there has been very little research on rural youth development, or 4-H in Canada. As a result, there is a lack of data which can be used in evaluation and program design. This project would help fill the gap by gathering information about resilience and the program elements that contribute to it the most, among 4-H Ontario horse club members.

Training in Virtual Environments on Mobile Devices

New emerging Virtual Reality (VR) technologies and mobile devices are changing the way that we are interacting with computing technology. The partner organization has a multimedia product that is used to train technicians to perform various maintenance tasks or introduce them to the interconnected components of a machine. The goal of this project is to research and develop software designs to port this multimedia training framework to mobile platforms. The specific challenges include conducting multimedia training on standalone mobile devices. For users to benefit from such training, a new interaction design is mandatory because of the shift from large screens, mouse and keyboard to small but high resolution touch screens on devices equipped, with on-board cameras and possibly other sensors. This project will help the partner organization to make strategic decisions on future product development and increase the research community’s understanding of the impact of mobile computing on distributed virtual training environments.

Flotation of high-organics fine phosphate particles

This research project seeks to improve the process which is used to recover fine phosphorous particles from mine tailings. Phosphorus based fertilizers are important for plant growth and essential to large-scale, high-efficiency farming methods. However, the processing method used to obtain phosphate from phosphate-bearing ore is not very efficient. Upward of 13 % of the available phosphate is lost to the waste stream during processing, which represents a major inefficiency and creates a large environmental problem. This research will consider the reaction conditions, such as mixing time and temperature that contribute to the improved recovery of phosphate during the reprocessing of mine tailings. As a result of this project, the industrial partner, a firm specialized in environmental consulting, will have an improved understanding of the behaviour of fine phosphate particles during reprocessing. This knowledge will contribute to the development environmental remediation strategies for phosphorous-bearing mine tailings.