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CSC494/CSC495Y1Y: FASE + CSC Opportunity (Deadline: Monday August 20, 2018)

CSC494/495Y1Y: FASE + CSC opportunity (Deadline: Monday August 20, 2018)

The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is looking for motivated computer science students to work with fourth-year engineering students on their year-long Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Projects. Please see the project descriptions below.

Each student group will consist of 1-2 CS students and 2-3 engineering students, and work under the supervision of an engineering faculty member. This is a great opportunity to work in-depth on a project with a dedicated team.

Please note that we are looking for a full-year commitment; you will earn 1.0 FCEs upon successful completion of the project in April. Students wishing to just participate for one term may be considered for the spring 2019 session, but all full-year applications will be given strong preference.

Instructions to Apply:

Send a brief statement of interest, resume and unofficial transcript along with the order of the preference to:

Donna Liu, Multidisciplinary Engineering Design Activities and Operation Assistant (mcp@mie.utoronto.ca)

Application deadline: Monday, August 20, 2018 at 5 p.m.

The acceptance is based on first come and first serve. Please do not hesitate to contact Donna Liu for project-specific questions at donna@mie.utoronto.ca

PROJECTS

1.
Industry Advisor: Spero Analytics/Centre for Global Engineering, U of T
Project ID: SA
Supervisor: Jörg Liebeherr (ECE)
Disciplines: ECE or Eng. Sci-ECE option (1), Eng. Sci-Energy option (1) ME (1), IE (1), CSC (1-2)
Disciplines still needed: ECE or Eng. Sci-ECE (1), Eng. Sci.-Energy (1), IE (1), CSC (1-2)
NDA: No
Project Title: Designing a robust, decentralized and self-healing mesh network for agronomic data collection in Nepal

Project Description:
Note: A site visit is potentially available.

Spero Analytics is an early-stage startup focused on precision agriculture in low-resource settings. The Organization was founded through a $50,000 USAID award which sought data-driven ideas to help smallholders in the lowlands of Nepal. Its solution is an unstructured wireless sensory mesh network which measures important agronomic parameters in farms on a large geographic scale; the network consists of individual nodes which measure (primarily) soil moisture and relay that data over radio to other nodes in the network using LoRA antennas. The data ultimately arrives at a server which synthesizes the data into actionable insights for farmers (e.g. irrigation scheduling advisories). The benefit of this system is that it can work in low-resource settings with no cellular connectivity and it can be made self-healing such that the network would repair itself in the case of node failure. It also should be self-powered.

The Problem: So far, Spero has conducted trials in Nepal with 3G-connected microcontrollers with the research organization CIMMYT, but limited testing has been done radio-equipped nodes; that is, the design, programming, and optimization of the unstructured mesh network itself is still under development and needs substantial effort to be completed. In addition, making the nodes self-powered is still unresolved and requires circuit-building, programming optimization, and extensive testing.

Designing a mesh network is easy; designing it to be robust, decentralized and self-healing is a monumental task, but if done correctly, it can help Spero deliver on its core promise to smallholder farmers. Further, the other applications that unstructured, self-powered mesh networks can be applied to is massive (e.g. seismic monitoring in remote areas, poaching monitoring using gunshot-sensors, etc…) and possibly very lucrative.

2.
Industry Advisor: Kinectrics Inc.
Project ID: Kinectrics1
Supervisor:
Project Manager:
Disciplines: CS (2)
NDA: yes
Project Title: Reverse engineer pre-existing software called ArcPro

Project Description:
Kinectrics is looking to reverse engineer some pre-existing Kinectrics’ owned software called ArcPro. Kinectrics initially developed the software in the 1990s. The software is used as a tool to determine the incident energy that a person would be subjected to in the event of an electrical arc flash event nearby. The software is based on arc physics modelling as well as real world lab data from Kinectrics’ high current lab at our Toronto facility. The software was developed in a mix of older languages including Visual Basic and others. Kinectrics is looking to have a detailed requirements doc developed from existing hard copy of the code base where available. This will involve a multidisciplinary approach between our arc physics expert as well as software programming expertise. Kinectrics is looking to ‘port’ the software to current computer languages and possibly run the software as a web hosted service. The current version of the software is sold worldwide to health and safety engineers looking to protect their workers from arc flash events and determine the appropriate level of PPE (personal protective equipment) to ensure lives are saved.

The value is fully aligned to Kinectrics core value statement of safety. Kinectrics is the historic R&D division of Ontario Hydro focused on cutting edge research into power generation, transmission and distribution. Kinectrics has labs dedicated to safety such as seismic simulation, high voltage testing, high current testing and others. The ArcPro software is designed to incorporate learnings from the lab into the software to help health and safety professionals, engineers and consultants worldwide protect power workers.

3.
Industry Advisor: Defence Research and Development of Canada
Project ID: DRDC
Supervisor: TBD
Project Manager: TBD
Disciplines: CSC (1-2)
NDA: yes
Project Title: The Design and Development of a Web-Based Tool to Support Collaborative Sensemaking among Teams of Analysts

Project Description:
Sharik (SHAring Resources, Information, and Knowledge) is a browser-based tool designed to support collaborative sensemaking among all-source intelligence analysts in distributed or co-located intelligence analysis locales. All-source analysts receive different types of information from collators or collection assets, and then share and integrate the information items to produce intelligence. Sharik is designed to support analysts and/or collators working together on different aspects of an intelligence problem by providing them with a means by which intelligence production can happen effectively, and in a collaborative fashion.

The latest version of Sharik (Sharik3.0) needs to be further designed and developed to incorporate some of the key unimplemented features including: posting and sharing Propositions (form-based and shorthand approaches), auto-completion of user entries, generating interactive graph visualizations of user-entered propositions, and generating INT Brief presentations in a semi-automated way. In particular, we seek new design ideas for the interactive visualization of propositions. Propositions are considered the units of analysis in Sharik and are entered into the system following a specific structure/syntax.

Top computer engineering, human-computer interaction, and computer science students who have web-development and user-centered design skills can provide us with unique and novel ideas to address the existing design and development challenges in Sharik.

The final product will contribute to DRDC’s progress in the development of tools, techniques, and advice for procurement to reduce the amount of time all-source intelligence analysts must search for information, and maximize the amount of time they can spend doing analysis.

4.
Industry Advisor: TD Bank Group
Project ID: TD2
Supervisor: Prof. Roy Kwon
Disciplines: IE (2-3), ECE or EngSci-ECE (1-2), Eng. Sci.-MSF (1), CSC (1)
Disciplines still needed: IE (0-1), Eng. Sci.-MSF (1), CS (1)
NDA: yes
Project Title: Analysis Challenge: innovative solution for housing and integration of disparate data sets

**Project Description:**The Design Research lab at TD houses state of the art technology for conducting experimental and experiential research. We are looking for innovative solutions to some of our data analysis process. Currently, we collect eye-movement and electrodermal activity (EDA) in our studies and we would like to aggregate and organize these data after collection to measure cognitive load in interesting and unique ways. Our first thought is to collect cognitive load from the eye-tracker and then layer in additional EDA data to improve validity and create unique metrics. We are looking for an engaged team of engineers to help us solve this interesting problem and create new metrics for the DR group at TD.

The Design Research team is housed in the Experience Design group at TD and conducts state of the art research related to user/design research across the bank. Our team runs multiple studies in a year and are extremely busy, thus, we need simple solutions to help automate some aspects of our process. These improvements will have a major impact on our ability to conduct quick testing and analysis as well as move our team into the future of user research!

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