Sponsors and partners

Selected problem descriptions

Crowd Estimation and Analysis of Movement in Video: Detecting, quantifying and tracking people in crowded scenes is a crucial component for a wide range of applications including surveillance, group behavior modeling and crowd disaster prevention. Each of these tasks is complicated by many different factors including: occlusions, variations in the camera viewpoints and crowd size and density. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Patriot One is interested in exploring different techniques that may be relevant to estimating crowd size and analyzing crowd movement for a range of different use cases. The techniques involved may require an understanding of statistics and/or differential calculus. Some experience using Python – or at least an interest to learn it – will be necessary.

The Black Arcs uses transportation modelling to simulate the way mobility in a city changes in response to various land-use decisions. Part of generating this model is determining a plausible set of activities for the simulated citizens to use when planning our their virtual days. Typically, this set of activities is generated using population statistics and aggregate trip data representing the number and type of trips taken by a population. Some communities, particularly smaller municipalities, often do not have trip data available. We are looking for a way to generate synthetic trip data with the minimal amount of sampling of real-world traffic counts at key intersections: Put another way, if we are given a graph consisting of edges and nodes, likely destinations in relation to this graph, and population statistics, can we sample traffic counts at key intersections in the graph to recover a likely set of paths representing trips taken in that community? Knowledge of graph theory, statistical analysis, and stochastic modelling are all expected to be useful for tackling this problem.

The New Brunswick Medicare program, as one of its responsibilities, audits physician's billings to ensure they are paid in accordance to legislation and negotiated agreements. Medicare process approximately 7 million physician billing claims per year, with a small percentage of these being audited for incorrect billing behaviour. Claims submitted incorrectly can have a significant financial impact and confound departmental planning and monitoring activities. Existing auditing approaches rely on an analysis of sampled claims. The results are later extrapolated across all billings to make financial recoveries. With the rise of new technology and computing resources, Medicare would like to explore more efficient methods and tools to help with the detection of anomalous behaviours in claim submissions. This project may be of interest to students familiar with statistical methods and machine learning.

Robotic prostheses map the input signals of the user - myoelectric signals - to the movement of the prosthetic joints such as an elbow or a finger. There are a variety of ways that we can map these inputs to outputs, and some are better than others. But what do we mean by better? Do we mean they are more reliable? Or that they are faster? Or that they require less energy by the user? In fact, when humans make movements, they balance a variety of factors such as reliability, speed, and energy. These factors are well known through a series of psychophysics experiments, but individuals may prioritize one more than another. The broad goal of this project is to be able to assess various control mappings based on how much an individual prioritizes various factors. Going a step farther, if we can assess them for a particular set of priorities, we can go on to optimize them for that set of priorities. These types of optimizations are computationally expensive, and benefit from closed-form equations describing how people move, given a particular set of dynamics and costs. There are existing closed-form equations that incorporate the costs that humans care about, and there are closed-form equations that incorporate the essential dynamics of human control signals, but there are no existing closed-form equations that incorporate both the costs that humans care about and the essential dynamics of humans. The specific goal of this project is to create such a closed-form equation. This project may be of interests to participants familiar with stochastic optimal control.

The New Brunswick Health Council (NBHC) is interested in leveraging large population level datasets for evidence-based allocation of health resources.  More specifically, NBHC has access to survey results from 14,000 New Brunswick residents involving more than 200 variables including information about general health, socioeconomic status, chronic conditions, geospatial data, etc.  The goal of this problem is to produce from this data a “sickness” index that will indicate which communities are in need of greater health resources (such as doctors). Students familiar with machine learning, statistical analysis, and/or statistical computing will be well suited to make progress on this problem.