Innovative Projects Realized

Engineering Design of Aquaponics System Towards Food Security and Food Sovereignty in Bella Bella, BC

The “Engineering Design of Aquaponics System Towards Food Security and Food Sovereignty in Bella Bella, BC” Mitacs Internship project is an important component of the ongoing larger project: “Cultivating Resilience: Aquaponics for Food Security and Wellness.” This project is funded by the New Relationships Trust not-for-profit corporation through their food security and sovereignty funding program. Under this project, Heiltsuk Climate Action is working with Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Seafood Innovation (CSI) to plan and design an aquaponics system that meets the needs of the Haílzaqv Nation. This internship will play a key role in the project by focusing on engineering design of the aquaponics study in order to facilitate food security, food sovereignty, empowerment, and community engagement. Through this project, Heiltsuk Climate Action intends to not only increase food security and sovereignty of the Haílzaqv Nation, but to also lead the way for other remote communities to adopt sustainable food systems that utilize clean energy.

Road to greener cities through business-to-government marketing

OPA Technologies specializes in geospatial management, contributing significantly to sustainable urban mobility. Their platform utilizes advanced mapping and real-time data to help cities efficiently handle these challenges, reducing traffic congestion and carbon emissions. By assisting transportation authorities in identifying disruptions, optimizing detour routes, and providing real-time updates, OPA Technologies plays a crucial role in improving traffic flow and safety, thereby fostering more sustainable and eco-friendly transportation networks within cities.
An obstacle of marketing geospatial solutions for road disruptions and sustainability is the complexity of integrating new technology into existing infrastructure or workflows within city administrations. OPA Technologies faces resistance due to concerns about compatibility and training needs. Given the increasing environmental consciousness among our populace, an enhanced Business-to-Business (B2B) strategy can be adopted by employing diverse copywriting techniques and increase brand awareness, which will be the main goal of this mandate.
This project will allow OPA technologies to have a bigger brand awareness, learn more about their consumers and their interest in sustainability, learn to better manage a team by having an intern joining the team and increase efficiency.

Advancing a Multimodal 3D Motions Library for DanceForms™

Leveraging its roots in dance and technology, Credo is building a multimodal motions platform for dance to enhance education, choreography and archival practices; the foundation being motion capture data. There are existing 3D motion capture libraries but they are either one of or many of the following: outdated, not comprehensive, poor quality, non-standard, poorly labelled or structured, etc., and are generally limited in supporting end user applications. Quality motion capture also requires specialized skills from capture to post-production. The proposed platform will support motion capture, keyframe animation, video reference(s), labelling and notes . The challenge is bringing together the different types of data effectively, simply, and elegantly. The first version of the platform will have two components: (i) initial collection of ballet/dance motions; and (ii) the playback app.

Visuospatial memory in active vision

Eye movements and visuospatial memory constantly interact to shape an efficient representation of the world. The behavioral link between eye movements and holistic scene memory has been extensively demonstrated, yet it remains elusive how visual item memory dynamically unfolds in active vision. Understanding the interplay between eye movements and memory, and identifying its neural mechanisms, is crucial for grasping why memory declines in older adults and those with neurological disorders. The project proposes, based on fMRI evidence, that gaze reinstatement—redirecting one’s gaze to previously observed locations, even without the original visual stimuli—triggers the recall of those visual items. The hypothesis will be tested with magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive high-resolution technique for probing neural activities and representations across the cortical surface. We plan to create a gaze-dependent visuospatial memory task that allows for precise control over experimental conditions, facilitating the examination of visuospatial memory. By integrating cognitive studies of eye movements with memory, employing eye-tracking and MEG techniques, and analyzing neural oscillations and decoding, our project aims to uncover the neural basis of how eye movements enhance memory retrieval. This research will pave the way for further cognitive and clinical research into the complex relationship between action and cognition.

Abdul Muhaimin Pandhiani – Proxure

The proposed project aims to enhance services at Proxure through research, strategy development, and marketing initiatives. By analyzing market trends, assisting with fundraising efforts, and refining marketing strategies, the project seeks to strengthen Proxure’s competitive position, attract investors, and increase brand awareness. Ultimately, these efforts will drive growth and success for Proxure in the competitive procurement industry.

Bridging the gap between diagnosis of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and prevention and/or early treatment of cardiovascular disease: a knowledge translation project

Our knowledge translation project aims to address knowledge and system gaps and missed opportunities for preventive medicine. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are associated with a higher risk of developing CVD, yet lack of patient and provider awareness and lack of system integration are barriers to providing preventative care and/or early treatment. Our project aims to bridge the gap between female-specific risk factors for CVD that manifest during pregnancy and the implementation of preventive care or early treatment as appropriate. Strategies include patient and provider education to underscore why this care gap matters as well as leveraging existing pathways to support patient navigation through the healthcare system and ensure pregnancy complications are captured and communicated back to the primary care provider. Preventive medicine leads to disease reduction, with lowered multimorbidity, polypharmacy and ultimately lower healthcare costs.

Stage en Design UX/UI – Système produits et « funnel » marketing

Le projet contribuera à actualiser et simplifier le système produit sur le site web de Carverinno Conseil pour le rendre plus intuitif et accessible, en intégrant son système à un plan marketing stratégique axé sur les formations en Design Thinking (ACTIVER), les sprints de stratégie (ORIENTER) et le UX Design Sprint optimisé à l’IA (ACCÉLÉRER). Notre hypothèse à valider est qu’en simplifiant les processus de vente en ligne et en offrant une meilleure expérience utilisateur, cela générera une augmentation significative des conversions et des ventes, contribuant ainsi à la croissance de Carverinno Conseil et au positionnement de l’entreprise dans son industrie.

Synthesis and Spectroscopic Characterization of Vanadium oxoComplexes for their Thermochromic Properties

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AI Improved Markerless Motion Capture For Dance

Motion capture is a technology to track human motion in 3D for replication with digital tools, such as mixed and virtual reality, video games, or movies. However, full 3D tracking requires the complex and finicky setup of multiple cameras that are prohibitively expensive to individuals or small studios. This is especially difficult with complex human movement such as in sports, dance, and more. While tracking with a single depth camera or webcam is possible, the quality of tracking is limited, and frequently tracked limbs will be lost due to fast 3D motion (e.g., a hand being obscured behind one’s back), which can ruin the capture, or require hours of tedious manual work to fix. Additionally, these cheaper capture methods are less stable, resulting in tracked motions appearing jittery, or jumping from position to position.

Antara Panja – ICTC

The Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) is a national, not-for-profit workforce development organization focused on strengthening Canada’s digital economy. ICTC’s research team conducts labour market and workforce development research, as well as program evaluation for ICTC’s workforce development programs (run by ICTC’s programs team). ICTC intends to begin offering program evaluation services externally, and in particular to other organizations with STEM workforce development & education programs. In addition, ICTC intends to begin offering economic impact analysis as a stand-alone external service (previously a part of some research contracts). The Business Intern will work with ICTC to develop a strategy for differentiating our services, marketing our services, and finding the right opportunities to build a portfolio of first projects completed with clients.

Developing and implementing a marketing plan and strategy for TRICOAST Education.

TRICOAST Education Inc. offers products and services to assist educators identify students in need of assistance or additional services beyond prescribed instruction, even when students have not yet mastered the language of instruction. Our products and services include:
• access to our digital platform and the curriculum-based dynamic assessment (CBDA).
• online resources to complement the CBDA.
• the ability to produce individualized student evaluation reports containing quantitative results and qualitative observations, comments, and pedagogical suggestions.
• audio files of each student; and,
• certification training for CBDA users.

As a start-up company, we need to produce a detailed and comprehensive marketing plan. The general objective of the intern’s work will be to play a pivotal role in steering the company’s strategic direction by generating a comprehensive marketing followed by its implementation plan. After developing the marketing plan, the intern will set up its implementation process including developing key metrics to measure the marketing process involving stakeholders, like internal employees, contractual workers, external marketing agencies, ad platforms like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, as relevant. The intern will develop Excel-based tools to keep a strong handle on past, present and future of various data points and metrics of the marketing plan over time, so that the data can be meaningfully available to management and investors.

Investigating the association between head acceleration events and neurocognitive impairment in elite mountain bikers

While mountain biking is a sport of growing popularity among adolescents and adults alike, it is also notoriously injurious. Mountain biking is associated with high rates of head injuries, and exposure to sub-concussive head acceleration events. Despite this, limited research has investigated the extent to which mountain biking participation contributes to brain injury and cognitive impairment. Novel neuroimaging technology for Neurocatch allows for a standard, sensitive on-site evaluation of the potential neurophysiological changes associated with extreme sport exposure such as mountain biking. As the intern and industry partner are both avid mountain bikers, they are leveraging the novel neuro-imaging technology and access to the mountain bike community to better understand the neurological exposure of the mountain biking participation. The proposed research will investigate the associated neural and cognitive changes following a mountain biking run and explore how this relates to the number of head accelerations sustained by the mountain biker.