RE/ACTION Showcase

AC students design personal safety app ahead of RE/ACTION Showcase

A team of Computer Engineering students at Algonquin College wanted to make safely walking the streets as easy as pushing a button.

The project, which will be presented during the RE/ACTION Showcase on Aug. 12, has culminated in a personal safety app called Aegis. Currently, in its beta phase, the app is designed to send emergency messages to a prechosen personal contact using Short Message Service (SMS) signalling.

“A user decides to choose specific contacts that they trust, and then when they know they’re going somewhere, they just input the address and then [make their way] there,” said group member Musa Bisimwa.

“And if they’re in distress at any time, [the app has] an SOS button. Once they click it, the person they selected will receive their current [location], and that person can either call them to figure out what’s wrong or call emergency services.”

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AC student fundraising group raises $1,000 in donations to fight food insecurity

Vipul Grover and his team in the Project Management program at Algonquin College wanted to help fight food insecurity among students. Their resulting fundraising project is one of the many that will be on display during the RE/ACTION Showcase on Aug. 12.

Their plan was designed with the intent to raise $1,000 in grocery donations for the College’s Students’ Association Food Cupboard, a resource that provides groceries and other aid to students who are financially struggling.

Roughly 40 per cent of post-secondary students in Canada face inadequate access to food, according to a study released by Meal Exchange, a Canadian charitable organization. Grover and his team — also consisting of Brianna Munch, Juhi Pinto, Karen Gil, Ronak Bhasin and Ekta Patel — chose to work on student food security due to team members and friends’ previous use of the Food Cupboard.

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AC students research call centre wait times for foreign workers

A research study on improving the call answer rate of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Client Support Centre (CSC) will be presented by Interdisciplinary Studies in Human-Centred Design program students at next week’s RE/ACTION Showcase. With a current answer rate of seven per cent at IRCC call centers, the study focuses on improving service to clients and stakeholders.

Held virtually on Friday, Aug. 12, the RE/ACTION Showcase highlights leading-edge applied research, done in collaboration with industry, institutional and community partners, providing a glimpse into the future of technology and the current state of innovation. The goal of RE/ACTION is to create a platform for those students to showcase their hard work to an audience of peers, faculty and community partners.

“As a team we chose to focus on the experience of temporary foreign workers (TFW) when contacting the IRCC call centre, but the interesting point is that everybody, be it either TFW applicants, student permit applicants or permanent residence applicants, has shared the same experience,” said team leader Melis Burkay.

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