Author: Doug Martin

David commented on how EBay suffered a security breach and, as a result, personal data was lost, on Global National, in the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post.

On May 12, 2014, School Director Selim Akl hosted the Sixth Annual Queen’s School of Computing Awards ceremony. The awards were created to recognize excellence in various forms of endeavour, an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of those in the school who distinguished themselves through their exceptional work, and as an opportunity to say thank you to those who made a difference in School life.

This year’s recipients were:

• The Howard Staveley Award for Teaching Excellence: Roger Browse and Brian Butler
• Ph.D. Research Achievement Award: Zhen Ming Jiang
• Graduate Student Distinguished Service Award: Saeed Shafieian
• Distinguished Graduate Supervision Award: Kai Salomaa
• Distinguished Service Award: Irene Lafleche
• Research Award: Khalid Elgazzar
• Award for Outstanding Contribution to School Life: Eril Berkok
• Award for Excellence in Teaching Assistance: Doug Martin
• Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award: Simrin Nagpal

Congratulations to the recipients, and many thanks to all those who worked hard to make this day a memorable one: Members of the Awards Committee, nominators, Lynda Moulton for producing the awards, and Eril Berkok, Ben Hall and Dave Dove for helping before, during and after the ceremony.

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Photos by Dave Dove

The fourth annual QGCS Conference took place on May 7th and 8th this year. It was, again, by all accounts, a successful, vibrant conference. Congratulations to the organizers and thanks to the sponsors and participants!

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Photos by Dave Dove.

We are happy to announce that on May 2, 2014 Queen’s School of Computing Professor, Dr. Randy Ellis, received an award from the School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for Outstanding Contributions to Society.

The award cites: “For pioneering and sustained improvements to computer-assisted surgery leading to worldwide advances in healthcare”.

In a Globe and Mail article, Queen’s School of Computing Professor Nick Graham (Director, EQUIS Lab) commented on Nintendo’s long fall in the gaming wars.

The School of Computing’s EQUIS and Perk Labs took part in Science Rendezvous Kingston 2014 held at the Rogers K-Rock Centre on May 3. The event was a free public festival of events intended to showcase “the passion and importance of science and research” and was aimed primarily at families with children (as you can tell from the accompanying slideshow!). Science Rendezvous was organized by Queen’s Faculty of Education and Community Outreach Centre. Thanks to our student volunteers from Perk and EQUIS for providing a School of Computing presence at the event!

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We congratulate Queen’s School of Computing Ph.D. candidates, Shane McIntosh (and his supervisor Dr. Ahmed Hassan), and Feng Zhang (and his supervisor Dr. Ying Zou), for their distinguished performance leading up to the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014), to be held in Hyderabad, India, May 31-June1.

Out of 112 submissions to MSR 2014, only two papers have been selected as distinguished papers. Both papers are by QSC students — one paper is by Shane and the other is by Feng.

Shane’s paper title is: “The Impact of Code Review Coverage and Code Review Participation on Software Quality: A Case Study of the Qt, VTK, and ITK Projects” co-authored with Yasutaka Kamei, Bram Adams, and Ahmed Hassan.

Feng’s paper title is: “Towards Building a Universal Defect Prediction Model”, co-authored with Audris Mockus, Iman Keivanloo and Ying Zou.

The School of Computing’s David Skillicorn has been awarded a Big Data, Big Impact Grant from the Cancer Institute of New South Wales and the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia to help personalize cancer treatment for children. Read the whole story in the Queen’s News Centre.

David was interviewed by the Globe and Mail on why Canada’s banks have weaker passwords than Twitter or Google. To counteract this, some banks have hired hackers to help find the weaknesses. David comments on this in the Toronto Star.

Queen’s School of Computing was proud to host the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s (ECOO’s) annual East Regional Programming Contest for eastern Ontario high school students on Saturday, April 26th. The three-hour event was held in prestigious Wallace Hall, where thirteen teams from schools in Ottawa, Brockville, Kingston, and Belleville were charged with finding working – and correct – solutions to four challenging programming problems. Congratulations to the winners, Bell High School Team 1, from Ottawa. Thanks to School of Computing Organizer Richard Linley, to ECOO for its donation to the event, to Co-Ordinator Chris Kulenkamp from Prince Edward Collegiate Institute, to School of Computing staff members Lynda Moulton and Irene LaFleche for organizing the food and venue, respectively, to the invaluable student volunteers at the event, Andrew MacDougall, Mitch Mullings, James Peng, and Christian Gilberg, to all the participants and their teacher coaches, and to Dave for his usual sterling job behind the camera lens.

You can read more about this event in the Queen’s News Centre.

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Photos by Dave Dove.