Economics#

2023-24 Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge#

I was one of five students selected from over seventy applicants to compete as part of UBC’s team for the 2023-24 Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge, where I was responsible for developing a VAR model in R using several economic datasets from Statistics Canada, the World Bank, and FRED. Along with the rest of my team, I prepared a presentation describing my model’s predictions and gave it before the Bank of Canada’s panel of judges.

Geomatics#

Are apartments allowed?#

AAA is a web application visualizing where affordable multi-family housing can be built in large Canadian cities, eventually aiming to include all provincial capitals and most populous cities. The stack is entirely open-source and self-hosted: the basemap is provided by vector tiles generated from OpenStreetMap data using Tilemaker, the zoning and building layers are custom shapefiles created using GIS data provided by municipal governments, and the frontend is written in Svelte using svelte-maplibre. The app is live at apartments.ericdaigle.ca.

Operation Icebridge gravity data analysis and visualization#

While working as a geodetic research assistant at Natural Resources Canada, I used geopandas and dask to gather, clean, and analyze Northern Canadian gravity anomaly datasets from Operation Icebridge, comparing the observed anomaliees to those predicted by Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Geoid Model and identifying geographical trends in the differences. My results were used to refine the CGM, contribuing to the development of the Canadian Spatial Reference System.

Free Software#

GNOME#

I regularly contribute new features and bug fixes to the GNOME desktop environment, particularly the Settings (gnome-control-center) and Files (nautilus) applications. I mostly work in C using GTK and GLib, with occasional contributions in Python and JavaScript. I don’t use GNOME myself, but I think it’s important for society to have a fully free, low-fuss, and user-friendly desktop available and I think GNOME is currently the project closest to achieving this.