NSERC Open Data Exploration The 2018 federal budget of Canada 🇨🇦 announced significant new investments in research. The Canada Research Coordinating Committee is defining a work plan to promote "international and risky research; support for Canada's next generation of researchers; equity, diversity and inclusion; and indigenous research and capacity building".
This site explores the NSERC Awards Data with the goal of helping Canada to achieve the best outcomes for research and training of future researchers.
Robert Lee Auditorium in the Alumni Center, UBCFA Fall General Meeting:
My central takeaway from the discussion below and the preceding actions by the Sr. Advisor on Academic Freedom is that faculty at UBC should be concerned. Guppy's Historical Note on academic freedom at UBC references the Smith report but presents no analysis of the issues surrounding the Berdahl Case. Why? When asked about the lack of consequences to senior and honorific administrators who collectively violated academic freedom at UBC, Professor Guppy confirms that the history shows that there are no consequences.
The proliferation of mobile devices, social networks and sensor networks, the massive data streams they generate, and increasing computational power generate research challenges and provoke widespread interest in mathematical sciences expertise and insight. Democratizing access to this expertise and insight catalyzes meaningful change. Higher education institutions are launching interdisciplinary programs in digital humanities, data science, scientific computation, mathematical modeling, bioinformatics and epigentics to address these challenges. To achieve success, these programs require easy access to state-of-the-art computing environments to support research, teaching and training activities.
McGill University’s Mission Statement and Statement on Academic Freedom define the values and parameters for how the University should react when the Premier of Quebec lashes out at an article in Maclean’s authored by a scholar at McGill. Before analyzing the situation at McGill, consider two fictional scenarios involving Institute Directors.
The UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd wishes to eliminate end-to-end encryption for WhatsApp and other social messaging platforms following the recent Westminster terrorist attack.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ministerial mandate letters for Science and Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) outline an agenda to investigate and improve the nation’s innovation ecosystem. Roundtable discussions on various themes are taking place across the nation as part of Canada’s Innovation Agenda, an initiative driven by Minister Navdeep Bains (ISED) and Minister Kirsty Duncan (Science). Minister Duncan has also launched Canada’s Fundamental Science Review and empowered an eminent panel chaired by Dr.
I will vote no confidence in the UBC Board of Governors. My main reason is that this Board’s governance failure led to massive losses in opportunity. By forcing President Gupta to resign, John Montalbano, Lindsay Gordon and Greg Peet did great harm to UBC, the Province of British Columbia, Canada and our international partners. The consequences of their actions disqualify Mr. Gordon and Mr. Peet from playing any role in selecting the next President.
Mathematical scientists can explore the idea to collaborate with industry using funds offered through the NSERC Connect program. NSERC Connect is ramified into three levels with funding support up to CAD5K, CAD10K and CAD25K. The CAD5K grant can be used to cover travel expenses related to the development of a new academy-industry collaboration. Regional programs aimed at promoting new academy-industry research collaborations or student-industry training programs may be supported at the CAD10K level. National programs targeting "substantial new research collaborations" between post-secondary researchers and non-academic partners may be supported at the CAD25K level.
The NSERC Engage program offers CAD25K to support academic researchers working to solve problems for an industry partner. The funds are directed to the academic researcher. All intellectual property developed in the collaboration are owned by the collaborating industry partner. Engage grants can be extended with Engage Plus. Industrial internships for graduate student and postdoctoral researchers can be supplemented with Mitacs Accelerate (see below). The application process is quite simple. Pawel Pralat of Ryerson has secured seven Engage grants. Some further notes (in the form of a GitHub Gist) on NSERC Engage including the application template are available here.
The Mitacs Accelerate program generates CAD15K to support four month long industrial internships for graduate student and postdoctoral researchers. The intern receives at least CAD10K as a stipend during the collaboration. Mitacs provides CAD7.5K and the industry partner provides the matching CAD7.5K. NSERC Engage grants can be combined with Mitacs Accelerate internships to fund a longer term interaction between university researchers and industry. The Mitacs Accelerate Cluster program is designed to support the formation of teams focused on advancing on a single cohesive research plan. Relative to a collection of single Accelerate internships, there are significant financial benefits generated through the Mitacs Accelerate Cluster program. Some further notes (in the form of a GitHub Gist) including the application template and "two-pagers" for industry partners and universities on Mitacs Accelerate are available here.
The Mitacs Elevate program provides a two-year training program to support postdoctoral fellows who lead an industrially relevant research project. The program supplements the academic activities of a postdoctoral fellowship with specialized training in communication, leadership and other skills crucial to success in business. Elevate Fellows receive a salary of at least CAD50K per year.
Further Assistance
Researchers with some interest in collaborating with non-academic partners are encouraged to reach out to staff at the Institutes, Mitacs, NSERC or their institution's research services office. If I can be of any assistance, please feel free to contact me.
The computing infrastructure as a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have originally been conceived as a resource to support their own electronic commerce business but other striking applications emerged. Netflix toppled Blockbuster and transformed the way we consume video atop the AWS infrastructure. Dropbox changed the way we store and share digital resources by building on AWS. My company Crowdmark leverages AWS to store and serve images of student work for evaluation by graders and further analysis.
