Undergraduate Summer Researchers

Dr Shahbazi believes in the impact of research on educating undergraduate engineering. “It is important to provide our students with opportunities to be involved in unique, state-of-the-art research projects. Student develop a genuine passion for looking at engineering problems from new perspectives and for innovating effective solutions to address them,” she says.

To realize this goal, she initiated an undergraduate geomatics research program, to which all Schulich students have been welcome. With the help of Geomatics engineering students society (GESS), she had also attracted first-year students to this program.

In the first year of this program, 11 undergraduate research students were recruited by Dr Shahbazi and were given the liberty to propose their own projects aligned with her expertise and the resources available at her lab. In the first week of their project, they were intensively trained to gain the technical skills needed to implement the projects. Graduate research associates also helped supervise undergraduate research students. The projects varied from vision-based solutions for indoor navigation of drones to deep learning for sport analytics from hockey game videos, machine learning for predicting the solar potential of Calgary rooftops using airborne ortho-photos, photogrammetry for crime scene analysis, optical flow for structure vibration measurement, computer vision for text recognition, photogrammetry for climbing site mapping, calibration of Intel depth cameras, evaluating low-cost GNSS solutions for integration on drones, damage detection from concrete sidewalks, data preparation for machine learning solutions, and mountain peak recognition using smartphones sensors.

In the second year, nearly 100 students applied to join this program. Several students were recruited, at least half of them also successfully achieved the PURE award.  Many faculty members helped with this initiative, including Dr Shahbazi, Drs Gerard Lachapelle, Ivan Detchev, Alex Bruton, Emmanuel Stefenakis, Elise Fear and Elena Rangelova.