CPEN 491 (Computer Engineering Capstone Design Project) is a two term course I completed at UBC. The goal of the course is to complete a design project with a team of 4-5 peers in collaboration with an client.
My team’s project was in partnership with Telus. Our supervising instructor was Professor Panos Nasiopoulos. The goal of our project was to create a proof of concept for how we could leverage machine learning to improve the handling of 911 calls.
The specific problem we chose to solve was triaging emergency calls during a large scale disaster. When these disasters occur calls are currently handled in a FIFO fashion meaning that urgent emergencies could be waiting while less urgent calls are being handled. We proposed a solution that would use machine learning to classify the urgency of the call and prioritize them accordingly.
This was done by creating a machine learning model that would classify the urgency of the call based on a transcription of the call and audio features. We created a web application that would allow the user to input a call and get a classification of the urgency of the call.
The entire project was done using open source, free, and commercially avaiable software and datasets. The specifc software, implementation, and detailed documents are Telus’s intellectual property.
Description of the course from UBC:
Design, analysis, and implementation of solutions in response to a real world computer engineering problem, provided by industry, research laboratories, or other suitable entities. Includes coverage of topics such as project management.
<cite><a href="https://ece.ubc.ca/courses/cpen-499/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UBC CPEN 499 Page, 2025 </a></cite>
