Second-year student's paper takes top awards in both undergrad and master's divisions

Wednesday, September 10, 2014
A paper written by Andrew Andrade, a second-year mechatronics engineering student, took top prize in the undergraduate category and third-place honours in the combined undergraduate/master's student division at the 2014 Society of Petroleum Canadian Regional Student Paper Contest. The event was held at the end of August at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
Andrade, the only second-year student presenting independent research, won for his paper entitled Multifaceted Approach to Oil Field Segment Analysis Using Artificial Intelligence.The judges were engineers and researchers from industry along with Memorial University researcher professors.
Andrade is the co-founder of PetroPredict, a startup that uses data analytics to find potential oil and gas leaks that may go undetected for years. Last spring the company won a pair of top awards at the Ontario Centres of Excellence Discovery Conference, including the inaugural David McFadden Energy Entrepreneur Challenge and the Elevator Pitch competition. It has also captured several major awards from Velocity, the University of Waterloo's startup incubator.