Innovative Projects Realized

Financial Literacy & Professional Mentorship for Indigenous Youth- IndigenousTech.ai – May 4 – Aug 28

IndigenousTech.ai supports Indigenous communities in Canada through skill-building programs for Indigenous youth (cybersecurity, financial literacy, technology for remote areas, and mentorship). This program will consist of hiring an Indigenous student from the University of Regina to facilitate an 8-week online program for 40 youths across Canada. This program will support the development of career pathways for the facilitator and Indigenous youth toward better-paying professions in STEM fields. This year, we will focus on capstone projects with our partners on the deployment of telehealth devices for remote communities, water quality data analysis, and climate change impacts on Indigenous communities.

L2M – CheapyEats

This project for CheapyEats addresses high food delivery costs by limiting options to one popular meal per time slot, enabling batch preparation and efficient multi-order deliveries to offer takeout at near dine-in prices. It will develop an integrated software system to automate manual operations like order processing, restaurant coordination, and driver dispatch, reducing complexity, labor costs, and enabling scalable growth for the partner organization. Ultimately, it benefits Canadians by making affordable food delivery accessible to budget-conscious households across the country.

L2M – Gluten Free Living

Gluten Free Living is a startup focused on helping people with celiac disease and other gluten-related dietary restrictions access reliable health, financial, and community resources. The project will involve a student intern working on market research, app development, outreach, and partnership building to improve the platform and expand its reach. Through this work, the partner organization will benefit from new research insights, stronger community connections, improved digital tools, and increased visibility. Overall, the project will help the organization grow its impact, better serve individuals with dietary restrictions, and build a more sustainable and scalable business model.

TERAMARA Subs 3D Drafting Project

The overall objective of this project is to create an extensive digital library for our buoy systems. This digital library will be used to catalogue the buoy parts and associated components for record keeping, version history, and client requests. The digital library will be used to analyze the parts to ensure that they align properly for system assembly, are designed for maximum fabrication efficiency, and what modifications are required for possible client customizations.

L2M Launch / NS / NourifyAI is a novel platform that provides explainable administrative and compliance assistance for Québec real estate brokers using causal inference, a key requirement in regulated sectors such as real estate.

NourifyAI is a novel platform that provides explainable administrative and compliance assistance for Québec real estate brokers using causal inference, a key requirement in regulated sectors such as real estate.

Scripting to Study the Integration of Visual Information via Peripheral Vision During Film Viewing

Filmmakers often use background elements to shape mood, guide emotions, and add meaning to a story. In Mother! (Aronofsky, 2017), violent events unfold behind the protagonist while the camera remains in close-up on her face, creating tension between focal attention and surrounding action. In Midsommar (Aster, 2019), faces and symbolic forms subtly emerge in trees and landscapes, often at the edges of the frame. These examples raise a key question: what do viewers actually notice and remember from visual information that lies outside their main focus?

This question sits at the intersection of film studies and visual attention research. Cinema is a complex experience that combines imagery, sound, emotion, and narrative, making it difficult to isolate how viewers process background or peripheral information. While vision science shows that peripheral vision can convey meaningful information, it is limited and highly sensitive to visual complexity. At the same time, many scientific studies rely on simplified stimuli or uncontrolled existing films, while film studies rarely test perceptual processes experimentally. This project bridges that gap by developing scripts for future short films specifically designed for research, enabling precise control over background action while preserving a coherent and natural cinematic experience.

Preuves pour renseigner des stratégies et politiques innovantes en détection et gestion de la tuberculose: examen de la portée à l’échelle mondiale, étude transversale des déterminants de la santé et mobilisation des connaissances à Madagascar

Le diagnostic et la notification de cas de tuberculose (TB) sont essentiels au contrôle de la maladie. Cependant, plusieurs patients ne sont pas diagnostiqués et déclarés dans certains pays, incluant Madagascar. Le recours à des tests génomiques modernes, le ciblage des caractéristiques des patients atteints de TB, ainsi que la suppression des obstacles à l’achèvement du processus diagnostique pourraient améliorer la détection lors de la recherche active de patients.

Les objectifs sont: 1) Répertorier les approches utilisant les données génomiques pour la prise de décision en santé publique et leur impact sur le contrôle de la TB; 2) Décrire les caractéristiques biologiques, comportementales et sociales des patients diagnostiqués en zone rurale à Madagascar; 3) Examiner l’influence de la distance au centre de diagnostic sur l’achèvement du processus diagnostique après dépistage en zone rurale malgache.
Le projet MITACS consistera à finaliser l’objectif 1 et interpréter les résultats des objectifs 2 et 3 avec des professionnels de la santé et santé publique malgaches.

Les résultats orienteront la recherche active de patients et les efforts de prévention vers les groupes les plus vulnérables, pour un meilleur contrôle de la maladie dans les régions fortement atteintes par la TB, à l’étranger comme au Canada.

Student mental health and well-being

This project aims to facilitate expanded reporting of student mental health and well-being data to various schools within Ontario. Such innovative reports would take the form of infographics that would provide school leaders with prevalence estimates based on the responses of participating students from their school alongside estimates for the entire province. Such reports are useful tools for assessing how students from specific schools are doing relative to the wider province, and for highlighting where increased programming or other resources and collaborations are needed. Such efforts are aimed at improving student mental health through prevention and early intervention. Manuscripts for publication are a tool to share our research findings with the broader academic community and other stakeholders, identify risk and protective factors, as well as address research gaps.

L2M – Align

This project will focus on testing, improving, and preparing Align, a digital app designed to help people stay consistent with their goals through accountability and social support. The project will involve user research, testing core features, and refining the app based on real user feedback to improve usability and effectiveness. The outcomes of this project will help guide Align’s initial launch and offer real-world insight into how accountability and social support affect user engagement.

L2M – Lokd Focus

Lokd Focus is a digital wellness platform that combines a mobile app with interactive physical hardware to eliminate phone distractions and improve student attention. The intern will engineer the frontend and backend technology and user experience required to deploy this system in shared institutional spaces, such as university libraries, allowing for enhanced study environments and insights into population and noise levels. Beyond productivity, the platform actively combats student loneliness by connecting like-minded individuals in real-world spaces to achieve shared goals. The benefit to the partner organization, Springboard Atlantic Inc., is the advancement of a practical, home-grown technology that addresses critical student engagement challenges, directly contributing to the organization’s mandate to commercialize research and foster innovation within Atlantic Canada.

Quantum Commercialization Alignment Analytics for Early-Stage Ventures

This project develops a practical analytics framework to examine how early-stage quantum startups present their business models, target markets, and commercialization plans. Using structured data collection and interpretable machine learning methods, the project will assess whether startups’ technical positioning aligns with clear and realistic market pathways. The result will be a transparent Commercialization Alignment Index that helps investors, accelerators, and policymakers better understand commercialization readiness in the quantum sector. For the participating institutions, the project strengthens research collaboration in business analytics and artificial intelligence, builds reproducible tools for evaluating emerging technology ecosystems, and creates a foundation for future joint research and student training initiatives in quantum innovation strategy.

L2M – CareAssist

This project will develop CareAssist, a shared decision-making platform that helps specialty and subspecialty teams better understand what matters to patients and clearly explain treatment options and tradeoffs. Patients complete a short pre-visit questionnaire to capture their goals, preferences, and concerns, and clinicians receive an easy-to-read summary plus patient-friendly option comparisons that support a more aligned conversation. Over the internship, we will define the best initial customer segment, design a pilot-ready workflow with measurable success metrics, and build a scalable business model (pricing, ROI, and go-to-market plan). The expected benefit to the partner organization is improved patient-provider alignment, more consistent decision conversations, reduced delays and “back-and-forth” in care planning, and a practical pathway to pilot and scale the solution within specialty programs.