August 3-27, 2021
Together with our partners, PIMS is excited to offer a 4-week virtual MathIndustry workshop for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the mathematical and statistical sciences to gain the industry skills needed for success in their careers.
This workshop has two main objectives:
Attendees will gain hands-on experience as part of a team working on a real-world problem posed by an industry partner. Potential industry partners can also contact us to learn more or propose projects.
The Gala and final presentations for the M2PI 2021 projects will take place on August 26th at 12/1 - 3/4 (Pacific/Mountain). Please contact us for connection details to join us for this event.
Explore the projects and reports from previous editions of MathIndustry
The final-report for m2pi 2021 is now available. It features projects from
Projects, reports, team members and other details are available on the MathIndustry 2020 page. .
Certified training programs
Agile software development, virtual collaboration, open source toolchains
communication skills, project management, effective teams & ethics
Performance metrics in sports have seen remarkable growth and development. What if we turned some of these mathematical tools on political performance? Building on last year’s M2PI project, the goal of this year’s project is to analyze data related to the activities of legislators in Canada and the USA with a view to developing engineered features which might reflect political performance. These engineered features should be granular enough to significantly inflect during the course of a parliamentary or legislative session, providing quantitative and comparative performance insight.
The City of Winnipeg’s Insect Control Branch (ICB) of the Public Works Department provides services to Winnipeg residents to control insects, including mosquitoes. The mosquito control program is based on an environmentally mindful insect control strategy, and includes: (1) A larviciding program that is 100% biological and uses four larviciding helicopters, (2) Monitoring and treating over 31,500 hectares of water area on an ongoing basis based on weather conditions, and (3) Monitoring for adult nuisance mosquitoes in New Jersey Light Traps beginning early May.
In this project, we will examine some of the key challenges facing the ICB such as (1) Predictive modelling of adult mosquito populations subject to changes in rainfall/soil moisture content and wind speed (2) Preditictive modelling of larval development subject to changes in spring and summer temperatures.
Roads are a vital component of today’s society. They not only connect us to different cities, towns, provinces, and countries, but they also provide of a means of transporting goods and services. Typically, roads are constructed using materials such as concrete, or asphalt. Between the cold winter temperatures and hot summer temperatures, as well as settling earth, cracks and potholes are bound to occur on roads.
Alberta spent over 1.6 billion dollars in transportation related needs in 2020-21. Over 26% of this money went towards road construction and maintenance related expenditures. Roads undergo regular inspection; a detailed Surface Condition Rating occurs every two years in Alberta. This helps determine the priority in which maintenance should occur on roads in the province. One method of conducting these inspections could be done via aerial imagery. While an individual could go through these images to inspect the roads for cracks and potholes, is there a way that machine learning and computer vision could not only detect cracks but also classify their severity?
This project concerns the transportation of heavy oil via pipeline, and the impact of congestion in transportation on pricing. Using stochastic transport optimization can we model and answer the following questions: When there are documented disruptions in the transport system, can we predict how large the congestion surcharge was and how prices responded to the disruption? Can we predict the occurrence of congestion by perturbing input factors in the system? How do shape and connections in the transport network contribute to the propensity for frequency of the congestion and magnitude of congestion surcharge?
Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 around the world, and government policies implemented as a response to the outbreak, many corporations have chosen to let their employees work from home to prevent the spread of the disease. In order to safely re-open the economy, one of the recommendations from health authorities is to allow only a limited percentage of workers in the workplace at any specific time. Given these constraints, it is useful for companies to arrange flexible work schedule so the employees go to offices during reasonable working hours, and at the same time reduce their commute time to improve their productivity. In this problem, you will help a model business to design and optimize their employees’ working-at-office schedule using a combination of criteria which you deem to be important, and real-life data such as traffic, limitation on work schedule hours, commuting time and others.
Environmental Instruments Canada (EIC) produces a Radon Sniffer which is used to find radon entry points. One method of determining the ratio of Radon 222 to Radon 220 (thoron) in the air is by implementing sampling and counting sequences and observing the change in the alpha count over time. The goal of this project is to develop an optimized sampling and counting sequence that results in the best statistical accuracy. Understanding radioactive decay and the coupled differential equations describing a decay series would be useful. A team with statistical expertise would be essential. Some familiarity with spreadsheets such as Excel would be helpful.
Consider a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) system monitoring a fibre optic cable deployed along an active roadway. The goal of this project is to use data collected from the DAS system to develop a detection and tracking method capable of identifying individual vehicles and reporting their position and velocity as they move along the road/fibre. Once the position and velocity are determined, various metrics for traffic flow could be determined, allowing for prediction and optimization of traffic congestion.
Standard procedure for building training sets for some machine learning models involves an individual going through hundreds of images and creating 2D binary matrices which reflects where the region of interest is in each image. Depending on the type of images, can we use RGB information or some other method to automate this process? The goal of this project is to develop a method which creates a mask of an image depicting where monochromatic objects occur in an image automatically and with limited user input.