The Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Internship Program

A Formula For Innovation

Manitoba's information and communications technology (ICT) industry is growing year after year. But as the industry grows, so will competition – not only for the next, great innovation, but also for highly qualified personnel to develop these innovations.

To gain the competitive advantage, Manitoba's ICT industry needs to leverage the expertise within the province's universities, invest in R&D and gain access to the up-and-coming generation of scientific superstars. The question is – how?

The Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Internship Program is designed to engage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and their supervising professors, with partner organizations including companies, hospitals, government labs and not-for-profit organizations. During four-month applied research projects, interns spend 50 per cent of their time onsite with the partner organization, developing cutting-edge mathematical solutions to address a key challenge defined by the partner organization. The balance of the internship is spent back at their home university, where the intern furthers the research in partnership with his or her supervising professor.

A $7,500 Investment Becomes $15,000

A four-month internship costs the partner organization only $7,500, which is matched by MITACS through the support of Western Economic Diversification, the Province of Manitoba and the University of Manitoba. For this minimal investment of funds, industry can learn more about the mathematical sciences, and the efficiencies and new approaches that it can bring to business.

For example:

• During an internship with a national communications company, an intern proposed a new security extension for Border Gateway Protocol, the only inter-domain routing protocol running on the Internet. This new extension uses a distributed trust model for verifying IP address "ownership" by corroborating information from multiple, independent sources. This is expected to help improve the company's research capability in network security.
• Working with a software company, an intern unified algorithms for structure prediction into a single formal framework that would become the basis of a software toolkit. Research into how words or phrases (related to patient injury or illness in the narrative fields of insurance claims documents) could be understood by the software platform yielded results that enabled the package to assign an appropriate treatment or diagnostic code. It is expected that this will result in cost and time savings for users of the software.
• For a health sciences technology company, an intern is developing a data-collection tool based on mobile IP infrastructure for EMS paramedic crews. This new tool will reduce the frequency of clerical errors inherent in handwritten reports while improving data analysis and patient care.

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Make the Connection!

For more information about how your company can access the vast intellectual capital within Manitoba's universities, visit www.mitacsinternships.ca or contact:

Deanna Lanoway
Phone: 204-510-8215
E-mail:dlanoway@mitacs.ca

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