Professor Mateja Šajna and MSc student Masoomeh Akbari collaborated with Alison Evans Adnani of Shopify Toronto’s DevDegree department in charge of its work-integrated learning program, as well as with Nevena Francetić, a uOttawa graduate working at Shopify Ottawa. Together, they used fuzzy cognitive maps to represent expert knowledge on the determinants of success and well-being of a student intern at Shopify.
Three groups of stakeholders – the DevDegree team at Shopify, a group of students, and a group of their mentors – each created a fuzzy cognitive map representing their collective view on the issue. Then, the researchers applied transitive closure, a new mathematical model, to each of the three maps. They concluded their study by comparing the different standpoints of each group to derive a set of guidelines for better learning outcomes. This was the first work-integrated learning study to use fuzzy cognitive maps and transitive closure, which will indeed benefit this area of research. Developed by Professor Šajna, this approach can be applied to almost any topic, as long as it is represented as a fuzzy cognitive map. The study is therefore a promising example of this new approach to decision-making, which could benefit the entire community.
For Shopify, this collaboration was not only an opportunity to establish a new academic partnership but also to gain initial experience with student interns at the graduate level and in the field of mathematics. Additionally, Shopify learned a unique approach to informed decision-making via fuzzy cognitive maps and transitive closure, and applied it to an issue of great interest. This pilot study also led to a Mitacs Accelerate internship for MSc student Masoomeh Akbari, offering her valuable networking experience as a young mathematician. Professor Šajna is hopeful that this project will evolve into a larger study, providing new industrial opportunities for students in the uOttawa Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the near future.
