Innovative Projects Realized

Laxlife Inc – Marketing Project – Digital marketing of apps for creating/sharing sport practice plans & playbooks

Laxlife Inc. is a company that offers instructional apps for various sports, including lacrosse, hockey, basketball, and soccer. Laxlife aims to scale up its operations in Canada. This project aims to help Laxlife Inc. increase its market share and achieve long-term success by developing product concepts and implementing an effective marketing strategy. This project will focus on comprehensive analysis of the market and generate new product concepts that meet customer needs and align with Laxlife’s business goals and values. Developing a clear and compelling marketing strategy that aligns with Laxlife’s overall business goals, values, and target market will enable to achieve the goal. Finally, this project will enable Laxlife in adopting the marketing plan with the goal of increasing awareness, the number of subscribers, and ultimately the number of users. This will include a successful product launch and onboarding process for current subscribers, followed by a marketing campaign.
The expected outcome of this project is the development of new product concepts and a comprehensive marketing strategy that will enable Laxlife to increase its market share and achieve long-term success. Additionally, the project will provide valuable experience to the student intern and potentially lead to a full-time employment opportunity with Laxlife.

Scalable Team-Based Learning – Structure Editor, GUI Editor and Teacher Dashboard

Parents, teachers, administrators, and senior governments all recognize the importance of K-12 Computer Science (CS) education in preparing tomorrow’s citizens for both future job opportunities and social issues caused by information technology. For example, Ontario’s 2020 math curriculum adds both coding and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). McMaster Start Coding (http://outreach.mcmaster.ca) is one outreach program who has delivered coding instruction and mentorship to thousands of children every year. The charity Fondation STaBL Foundation was established to develop tools capable of scaling this activity up to millions of children, and ensure that every child graduating from grade 8 has the math skills required to succeed in high school algebra, and that they can use those skills in software development.

In this project, we will develop or improve prototypes for three of these tools: (1) a structure editor for Elm, which bridges the gap between block-based coding like Scratch in the primary grades, and the textual languages used by professionals, (2) a drag-and-drop editor for user-interface elements like buttons, scroll bars, and menus, and (3) a dashboard where teachers and mentors can see at a glance how their class or project team are progressing so they can direct their resources to children most in need of their aid.

Exploring ways to reach students in rural Francophone communities

The Gaia Project (“TGP”) is a New Brunswick-based charitable non-profit with the mission to empower youth to take action on climate change through education. For over 10 years, TGP has been providing in-class support to teachers across New Brunswick and the unceded territory of the Wabanaki peoples by delivering hands-on experiences that ignite student curiosity, enhance skill development, and provide meaningful and developmentally appropriate information related to the causes of and solutions to climate change.

The organization has experienced challenges in reaching northern communities of New Brunswick. The schools in these regions tend to receive less resources and outreach opportunities which can be very beneficial to student engagement. There is a demand for program delivery, but without staff located in the region it can be very difficult to partner with these schools.

The Gaia Project feels that through implementing a francophone strategy we will be able to engage underrepresented areas of the province. We currently do not have the capabilities to do so, and an innovative French language strategy would be able to accomplish this.

Innovative Website and Web Application Development for Law Enforcement

Forrest Green, in collaboration with Saint Mary’s University, will work with the intern to successfully develop and implement new web solutions and module for Police Services across the country. The intern will work on innovative dashboards to support crime trends and crime data (external) as well as aggregated officer data for use of system analysis including reporting, citations, workloads, and budget support. Along with the dashboarding, the intern will support a lead developer on building modules to optimize resources and reduce labour.

Développement de modèles IA parallélisés adaptés à la prévision court terme des mouvements d’énergie dans des équipements électriques de moyenne tension

On cherche a prevoir via l’intelligence artificielle (IA) comment un groupe d’equipements de moyenne tension appele «
paste satellite » va alimenter en electricite son secteur de distribution pour les prochaines heures et jours. Le
comportement d’un poste satellite est defini par trois unites de mesure qui sont la puissance active en megawatts (MW),
la puissance reactive en megavars (MVar) et l’intensite en ampere (A), et qui sont prises pour trois types differents
d’equipements du paste (le transformateur, la barre et le disjoncteur triphase), soit de l’ordre de cent points de mesure par
paste. Dans ce contexte, le travail propose consiste a construire des modeles IA qui, par apprentissage sur les mesures
observees aux pastes satellites (puissances active et reactive, intensite) sont capables de simuler puis prevoir ces grandeurs
physiques (extrants) a partir de donnees meteorologiques locales disponibles (intrants meteorologiques) et eventuellement
d’autres donnees non-meteorologiques (intrants non-meteorologiques).

Assembling a system for continuous production of carbon nanopearls

Carbon nanopearls are an exciting novel class of materials that present unique characteristics, and they turn out to be an excellent alternative to carbon nanotubes for different applications. Presently, they are experimented with success as material for cold cathodes for electron?beam based instrumentation applications and they can be used for the development of polymer nanocomposites with specific properties. We plan to develop a new chemical vapor deposition reactor with a mechanism for allowing a prolongation of the nanocatalyst lifetime that can favour the material growth process. A new fabrication process based on optimization of factors such as temperature, gas fluxes and substrate rotation speed will be determined in order to obtain the highest throughput for a continuous production.

Design and Control of an Intelligent Mobile Robot with Open Architecture – Phase I

Atlantic Business Express is looking at bring the service robots to Canada, starting in Nova Scotia through working with Dalhousie University. Many commercial robots that the company currently own, do not offer open architecture integration with new modules and only provide an interface which is not compatible with many devices for further development. The objective of this project is to design and control of an intelligent medium size mobile robot base with an optimal payload of around 10 kg. The intelligent mobile robot is designed to be an open architecture with ROS2 being used as the software integration for all components. The project will help the company to grow and have larger share of the market in service robots. The Canadian community will benefit from the state-of-the-art research project. Autonomous service robots offer improved capability in freeing up people from unsafe tasks and allowing people to handle more complex workload.

Exploring the function of the Pic2 protein in copper transport

Yeast will be used as a model to investigate inherited mitochondrial diseases in this research project, with a particular emphasis on the functional role of the Pic2 protein. Although initially identified as a mitochondrial phosphate transporter, recent studies have proposed its involvement in copper transport. To gain insight into Pic2 and its function, a combination of genetic, molecular cell biology, and biochemistry techniques will be utilized. The project’s overarching objective is to improve our comprehension of inherited mitochondrial disease mechanisms and potentially discover new treatments for these disorders.

Electrically controlled 1-DOF forearm-hand active prosthesis for children

The essence of the project is to create an adaptive electrically controlled prosthesis for a child’s hand. The prosthesis should be able to be resized for the patient at the stage of computer-aided design. To realize this, it is proposed to create a parametric model of the prosthesis in a CAD system. Also, during the project, it is necessary to create a prototype of the future device with one degree of freedom i.e., the hand can make only one movement – closing or opening the fingers. This design is quite easy to use and does not require much time for patient training. At the same time, it restores the patient’s grasping function, which significantly improves the child’s quality of life. To implement the control system, a system of myosensors is envisaged, which will be located on the patient’s stump.

Development of Assisted Reproductive Technologies for Canadian Snakes

The research project will focus on the development of assisted reproductive technologies for Canadian snakes at risk of extinction. Assisted reproductive research include studies focused on increasing the fecundity or reproductive success of a species; many technologies such as artificial insemination are well developed for mammals. In contrast, studies on augmenting snake reproductive success are lacking. This study will specifically focus on developing appropriate methodology for the collection and cryopreservation of spermatozoa cells. Work will include ex situ (in human care) populations and focus on species at risk in Ontario including the Massasauga Rattlesnake and Grey Ratsnake.

Ontario Provincial Police School Resource Officer Program Review

The study aims to address the call for police reform and removal of police officers from schools by examining the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) School Resource Officer Program and its interactions with youth. The research seeks to explore whether police officers should be present in schools, and if so, to what degree, in what circumstances, and with what objectives in mind. The student is going to perform in the role of co-athor on a peer-reviewed journal, the second interim report to the OPP, and participate in a presentation to the Commissioner of the OPP Command Team (August 10).

Towards an improved representation of potential evapotranspiration for oil sands reclamation and monitoring projects

Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) is an important input variable for hydrological models, however, accurately estimating it can be costly. Several simplified models exist for estimating PET, however, their accuracy depends on the quality of input data, assumptions, and land type. For the various oil sands reclamation and monitoring projects, a wide range of estimations currently exist. The purpose of this research is to utilize existing field data from Suncor projects to assess the effectiveness of several generalized approaches for calculating PET and assessing how they compare to field-measured values. The results generated in this proposed study will provide recommendations on how to establish standards for generating accurate PET measurements across monitoring and reclamation projects.