Research

Smart Tenant wins first place at RE/ACTION Showcase

Smart Tenant earned first place at Friday’s RE/ACTION: Applied Research Showcase. The mobile app provides a platform for tenants to connect with the local community, buy and sell good in an online marketplace and correspond with their shared property management company.

The members of the student team that designed the app — including leader Kiet Vuong, mobile app developer Evan Liko, web developer Son Tran and UI/UX designer Kseniia Chornokondratenko — each brought their own expertise to achieve the client’s vision. Features of the app include private messaging between tenants, landlord/tenant correspondence through cloud functions, as well as moderation of not safe for work content on the newsfeed and marketplace screens through the use of AI.

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Smart Tenant wins top prize at RE/ACTION Showcase

The winner of Friday’s virtual RE/ACTION: Applied Research Showcase is Smart Tenant, a mobile app for a property management company in Ottawa to engage in better and continuous communication with their tenants.

Hosted by the Office of Applied Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, the goal of RE/ACTION is to create a platform for students to showcase their hard work to an audience of their peers, faculty and community partners. Five project finalists were chosen out of 43 submissions to present to a panel of industry professionals during the live Zoom event.

Created by Mobile Application Design and Development students Karim Shaloh, Eric Shantz, J-C Castagne, Mohsen Qaddoura, Evan Liko and Sandeep Saini, Smart Tenant is a social platform for tenants in their client’s properties to communicate with one another. Team lead Shaloh detailed the team’s work over the past four months in creating an app that would help increase tenant retention, satisfaction and overall customer experience.

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Walking with wild elephants and swimming among dolphins: this AC project knows no bounds

Imagine a world where walking with elephants helped children manage their anxiety.

Using the power of virtual reality (VR), a team of three Algonquin College students are bringing dolphins to doorsteps, pyramids to backyards and elephants to classrooms to support children in need of a calming, secure and emotionally-safe environment.

Through the project New Realities: A Guide for Virtual Reality in Classrooms and at Home, learners from the Human-Centred Design Lab – Sara Hubberstey, Jean Pierre Lachance and Maria Tchernikova – are helping their client, Wishplay, bring VR to children at home and in the classroom.

Along with supervising professor Jed Looker, the team is developing a VR user guide that explores how to set-up and administer VR for children aged 6-12. The students determined user guide best practices through literature reviews, speaking with subject-matter experts, as well as interviews with educators and guardians.

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