Innovative Projects Realized

Grants Management Software: Evaluation of Adoption of Grants Management Software Amongst Government Agencies and Non-Profit Organizations

As a grants life cycle involves many steps, it is crucial for grantmakers to monitor and manage the process. While digital management offers efficiency, multitude of clients and solutions they require results with highly fragmented market. By identifying stakeholders in grants management marketplace and by assessing their needs, software vendors can become more competent in designing solutions that are suitably tailored for clients. By conducting a competitive analysis of industry with regards to vendors, grantmakers, governments, and clients, all parties will have a comprehensive understanding of how effective to adopt software for grants management functions. 

Mobile Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Technology

The research project will involve the development of features and techniques to aid people with communication disabilities through the use of consumer mobile devices (ex. smartphones) and tablet computers. Some of the major areas of interest include: location aware vocabularies, predictive sentence construction, and support for alternative input for people that also suffer from motor control problems. This work will directly benefit the partner organization by providing enhancements and breakthrough, cutting-edge, technology features to the MyVoice commercial product. These features will give MyVoice a competitive advantage in the AAC technology market and will provide a significant benefit to users of the application.

A Body-Sizing Model to determine Personalized Spring Stiffness for the Personal Lift Assistive Device (PLAD)

The Personal Lift Assistive Device (PLAD) is an “on-body” ergonomic aid comprised of: 1) a spring box to assist workers’ back muscles; 2) padded cables to tension the springs at the shoulders and feet; and, 3) a pelvic spacer to provide improved leverage. In all previous tests, the PLAD has reduced back force requirements by ~ 20% during lifting and static holding tasks. This proposed research project has three phases: 1) develop a sizing chart for small, medium and large workers using previous data and lab tests, 2) determine its effectiveness in a field trial at a local nylon company, and 3) create a spring stiffness chart, PLAD sizing brochure and computer interface to be used by Peakworks Inc. This work will help the company: i) manufacture PLAD systems that are ideally suited to workers’ personal characteristics and their job demands, and ii) reach the marketplace sooner with a simple and cost-effective marketing aid.

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) game in mineral exploration – how is it played?

Using the same Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) voluntary codes (“rules”), different junior mineral exploration companies obtain different CSR outcomes, i.e. the rules do not make the game. The overall study aims to find out how the game is played ‘on the ground.’ This internship covers part of the exploratory phase of the project that aims to understand the context and to help decide on aspects that should receive priority attention in the more detailed main study. It will also help identify participants in the more detailed study that will follow. 

Single Frequency RTK Technology for Handheld GPS

Feasibility Assessment of the Development of a Cost Effective Type-Specific Small Aircraft Simulator

Current flight simulation technology is aimed at the commercial aviation industry, with larger simulators used to simulate larger aircraft. There are currently only a limited number of high fidelity type-specific aircraft simulators available and even then, at a much higher cost than most flying clubs can afford. This project aims to produce a proof-of-concept of a Diamond DA20 aircraft simulator to determine the feasibility to produce the simulator at a low cost while meeting Transport Canada requirements for a minimum of Level 5 Flight Training Device certification. Reducing cost without sacrificing fidelity of the flight simulator comes with many technical challenges which will require the collaboration of the Carleton University research team, OAS Flight Centre principals and staff, and the B-Con Engineering team. This project will provide OAS Flight Centre with a viable option for increasing its simulator capacity and student throughput. For B-Con, this project will provide a platform to demonstrate its technology for the projection of images onto non-flat surfaces. The feasibility  assessment will be followed by the simulator manufacturing and eventual addition of motion cueing.

Development of Indicators and Benchmarks of Sustainability for a Standardized Municipal Sustainability Index

Municipal sustainability in Canada has been gaining importance in recent years. In order to ensure real progress is made, sustainability assessment must be conducted. Indicators are the recommended measures for sustainability assessment. This research project will create a core set of indicators for use in a sustainable cities index. A set of sustainable best practices will also be compiled to assist in developing benchmarks for use in ranking of sustainable cities. These objectives will be completed by conducting both academic and practitioner literature reviews and a comparison of the two. Further depth will be gained through selected interviews with relevant city officials and/or staff. The research gained through this project will benefit the private sector (MMM Group) by providing the indicator and benchmark bases for their ‘successful cities audit.’if"

Research on High-Performance Tree Differencing Algorithms

Metafor is developing a new class of IT system management solutions and as a part of this, Metafor wants a method to show differences between multiple deployed instances of an application. To implement this, Metafor requires an accurate and high-performance generalized tree differencing algorithm. Differencing algorithms are used for comparing different versions of a document or snapshots of data to find similarities and differences between them. And tree differencing algorithms perform differencing on hierarchical or treestructured data. Therefore, the goal of this project is to do a comprehensive survey and analysis of the recent research literature in the field of tree differencing and to develop an appropriate algorithm that would fit the best for the type of data Metafor is dealing with. In order to determine the appropriate algorithm, the performance of the algorithms will be evaluated based on running time, memory consumption and the optimality of the results. Test environments will be designed and algorithms will be implemented correctly so that we can fully evaluate them.

Designing novel algorithms for capturing and analyzing user experience in 4G networks

Fourth Generation networks (4G), mainly Long Term Evolution (LTE) technologies are going to be deployed in large scale starting from 2011. To leverage the benefits of this huge market opportunity, service and content providers need to deliver data capacity and Quality of Service (QoS) similar to existing w ire line solutions. But, assuring good QoS over w ireless links to the 4G mobile users would be an extremely challenging task. From this perspective, tools and solutions to service-level assurance for 4G networks w ill be in great demand. Hence, developing a software based framework for service quality assurance of 4G services is very important, because of the still evolving LTE standards and services. Having a software based framework, which the proposed project focuses on, w ill give complete flexibility for upgrade of the solution, as the standard and mobile services evolve.

Hydrological Simulation of the Churchill River Watershed Using Bias Corrected Climate Model Data

The goal of the proposed research project is to use bias corrected climate model output to drive a hydrological model of the Churchill River Basin in Labrador. This represents a major milestone in an existing research collaboration between Memorial University and Nalcor Energy, the primary objective of which is to determine the effects of climate change on the Lower Churchill Hydroelectric Project, to be located on the Churchill River. Objectives of the current proposal include: learning how to use Environment Canada’s GEM model; processing climate model output from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP); collecting observed data from sites in Labrador to help with bias correction, and; using processed NARCCAP data to drive the hydrological model within GEM. This internship will provide proof of concept using data from one climate model that will allow expansion to all NARCCAP ensemble members in the future. 

Consumption of Smartphone Application Traffic Markings

Mobile Network Carriers are currently experiencing data traffic at such high levels that congestion is becoming an increasingly critical problem. These mobile carriers are exploring new methods to reduce congestion. Malicious traffic that is generated by smartphones is an important issue relative to this problem domain. There is even potential for a particularly virulent piece of code to even bring down the network. This research focuses on simplifying the problem of identifying which mobile device applications are generating the problematic traffic for the network carriers’ and integrating this information with the carrier’s existing network-level QoS solutions. This will be done by creating and developing the server-level solution required to consume the marking produced at the mobile device level regarding which applications (or applications classes) are best to shed to mitigate network overloads. As such, this solution will act as the interface between the existing carrier-level QoS solutions and the mobile device application-level network traffic marking process (to be developed under a separate but relative MITACs Internship). As part of the University of Victoria’s Entrepreneurial Engineering Masters Program, I will work closely with experts from Wesley Clover and the Alacrity Foundation with the intention of providing research that at the end-ofthe- day can be deployed to address this emerging carrier-level critical mobile device concern.

Supporting Role and Request Conceptual Modeling with Ontology- Based Reasoning

This project involves creating a comprehensive method for developing and maintaining a Meta-model for the representation of Role and Request Modeling (R2M) constructs based on the notion of ontologies. R2M provides clear definitions and semantics for the constructs of conceptual models as well as a set of rules for guiding the modeling process. Currently, there are some challenges in evolving and maintaining R2M such as ensuring the consistency of any new rule with the set of existing rules and ensuring that a model conforms all R2M rules. The intern will provide an ontology-based Meta-model for modeling R2M constructs, rules, and their changes and updates. Using ontology constructs and reasoning techniques over them, the intern will provide a method for recognizing any update that is not consistent with the defined semantics for R2M and a method for ensuring that all rules are conformed by any given model. ModiViz, which is the owner of the intellectual property relating to R2M, will use the outcome of this project for having a single repository containing all the knowledge of R2M, having the ability to ensure consistency in the Meta-model, paving the way to the introduction of much more robust model validation and guidance in the tool, and educating modelers that much quicker.