Sriram Sundararaman - During my four month summer internship at Rocscience, I worked on developing a new software called RSPile that analyzes the behavior of driven piles. The software computes the ultimate axial capacity as a function of depth in cohesive, cohesionless, or mixed-soil profile. In addition to designing the user interface, I implemented the algorithms required and tested them using real-world data. I gained additional insight in good software engineering values and practices. I had great flexibility in developing the software and I am grateful for the support of the Rocscience team, namely my supervisor Dr. Thamer Yacoub and the software developers. I thoroughly en-joyed interning at Rocscience as it provided an experience that is unparalleled in the classroom.

Jing Bo Yang - For the past four months, I worked with the RS3 team to develop the next version of this full-fledged 3D CAD and FEA package. I was given the tasks of reworking user interfaces, ren-dering boundary condition, communicating with the engine and etc. My most important contribu-tion to the team was the development of a tool that checks for invalid geometries. I researched on efficient object-collision detection algorithms as well as data structures that can store the connectiv-ity of geometries. I implemented checks for geometries that could cause meshing errors, including intersecting triangles and surface cracks. It was a great experience for me to work with this group of dedicated people.

Owen Westland - During my time at Rocscience I was working on the new version of Slide. The first project I had was to develop a new interface option in Slide that added a new display allowing users to quickly modify properties. This new tool helps to streamline the Slide interface because it allows users to avoid navigating through dialogs while modifying certain aspects of Slide. The second project I had was integrating a new seismic analysis tool using the Newmark method. This is a useful new modeling tool that gives users important information on the behavior of a slope in response to seismic activity. Overall I found that this summer was an incredible learning opportunity in a very enjoyable work environment.

Sriram Owen Jing Cody Russell

Rocscience Inc. Summer Interns 2015

Cody Tran - During my internship at Rocscience, I was responsible for updating CPillar 3.0, which was released for DOS over a decade ago, to work on Windows operating sys-tems and to add new features, such as a probabilistic analy-sis, new strength criteria, and more, to the project. I started off by making a preliminary design for CPillar 4.0. Then, I was to start developing CPillar 4.0 by using an existing software application made by Rocscience as a basis for the project. Throughout the course of the internship, I learned a lot about software design and development. The part I enjoyed the most was implementing the probabilistic analysis and watch-ing the application compute thousands of samples of factors of safety and probabilities of failure almost instantly. Also, I am excited for the release of CPillar 4.0 this fall! On a whole, my experience at Rocscience has been very positive. Help was readily available from many people whenever I needed help, and the laughter and yelling from daily ping pong games was very amusing.

Russell Todd - During my internship at Rocscience, I worked on updates to the Slide statistical engine for the Slide 7.0 release. More specifically, I focused on controlling/inducing cor-relation between samples of material properties. In order to do this, I developed a simulated annealing algorithm (non-linear optimization) to reorder material property samples after they were generated through their specified sampling techniques. In the process of researching, implementing and optimizing my solution, I was able to learn new concepts through scholarly articles, work with the OpenMP API (multithreading) and get experience developing user interfaces. Overall, my experience at Rocscience has been extremely rewarding and educational.