News

Dr. Karim Lounis is a recent School of Computing graduate who has been awarded the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal. This Gold Medal is a highly prestigious and competitive prize that is awarded each year to a student graduating with the highest average from a doctorate degree to recognize student’s outstanding scholastic achievements. Here is what Karim had to say after winning the award.

Continue reading “Dr. Karim Lounis receives the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal”

The Queen’s School of Computing is proud to announce that undergraduate student Nicole Osaynde has received an Agnes Benedickson Tricolour Award.

When asked what it means to have won this award, Nicole states:

“For the first time ever 4 Black women are recipients of this years award, and I am honoured to be a part of this history making. I think it truly reflects the hard work of namely Black students from the Class of 2021, who have worked tirelessly to make queens a more inclusive space. It feels great to be seen and heard.”

The department is truly proud of her for her academic excellence and her committment to  EDII!

Congratulations  Nicole!

Professor Bram Adams has been noted as the recipient of the MSR 2021 Foundational Contribution Award. MSR is the international conference on Mining Software Repositories which has been celebrating the achievements of the MSR community since 2017. The MSR Foundational Contribution Award  “recognizes individuals, or groups of individuals, having produced fundamental contributions in the field of mining software repositories, which helped many others (not limited to the MSR community) to build on it to advance the state of the art”.

Bram’s work focuses on release engineering which is also known as the activities required to bring code changes made by individual developers into the hands of the end user. As the concept gained further momentum in 2010, Bram has always held an active role in the field. He says

“Despite the large changes in the field in 2010, and the large interest by industry, I noticed that only very few researchers took release engineering serious as a field worthy of exploration and research. Hence, I’ve spent a lot of time “evangelizing” release engineering, through the organization of workshops , presentations, a grad course. Together with my lab’s research on novel release engineering topics (we were the first to empirically analyze many release engineering issues), this has led to a growing community, to the extent that continuous delivery and other release engineering topics are now common-place in software engineering conferences.” 

The MSR Conference nomination jury  has recognized Bram with the following summary.

Bram Adams is a pillar of the MSR community. He is one of the early evangelists and pioneers of the field or release engineering, has co-organised the RELENG workshop for several years, and organised Dagstuhl seminars on release engineering and DevOps. He brought together industry and academia at the events he organized or co-organized, which gave opportunity to industry practitioners to collaborate with academics in addressing pressing issues in release engineering, leading to better industry practices and the advancement of the field of release engineering. This also led to the forming of a community in the field of release engineering. Through these talks, events, and service he brought awareness to the field and attracted new people to address problems in release engineering. At the same time, he organized events and courses meant to involve students in the research and to promote teaching release engineering to students, such as the first Devops Educators Workshop and a course on release engineering at Polytechnique Montreal which resulted in 14 student publications over the years. He has also mentored several students and postdocs that have since become researchers in the field of MSR. He has also contributed to the MSR community in various roles over the years, such as Steering Committee member, PC member, and PC chair.

Professor Bram Adams will officially receive his award at a virtual awards ceremony  which will take place at the 18th edition of MSR in May

Congratulations Bram and keep up the wonderful work!

Dr. Ahmed Hassan has been recognized for his outstanding role as an educator in software engineering by the IEEE Computer Society

He has received the TCSE Distinguished Education Award. The award description is as follows:

“The TCSE Distinguished Education Award is presented annually to an individual for outstanding and/or sustained contributions to software engineering education.”

Dr. Hassan  will receive his award virtually at the  ICSE 2021 which will be held on May 28,2021.

Congratulations Dr. Hassan!

Faculty, staff, and students from the Med-i Lab and the Perk Lab  participated in the 19th Imaging Network Ontario meeting that brings together the best in-class physicians, researchers, healthcare professionals and trainees to present the state of the art in health imaging and its impact. Staff and students chaired from the Queen’s School of Computing, presented and participated in numerous activities. A number of students from these labs were recognized awards.  The winners are as follows.

Andrea Perera-Ortega

Andrea won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award for her presentation  “Machine learning to detect brain lesions in focal epilepsy. After winning this award, she states:

It means a great deal to me to be presented with this award. This was actually my first project involving machine learning and the experience I had led me to pursue a Master’s degree at the Med-i Lab here at Queen’s. I learned so much and am incredibly thankful to Jonah Isen, Dr. Alireza Sedghi, Dr. Parvin Mousavi, Dr. Gavin Winston and Dr. Sjoerd Vos for supporting me and teaching me so much throughout this project.

Jessica Rodgers

Jessica won the  PDF Best Oral Presentation Award for her presentation “Feasibility of fusing three-dimensional transabdominal and transrectal ultrasound images to visualize intracavitary gynaecological brachytherapy applicators.” Jessica comments on what it has meant to win  this award. She states:

I’m very grateful to have received this award for my oral presentation describing the feasibility of combining different types of 3D ultrasound images to visualize devices used during internal radiation therapy of gynecologic cancers. This award adds confidence to my ability to tell the story of my work to diverse audiences, which is important for the highly interdisciplinary research in this field. I also hope that with this award I can encourage other trainees to develop their communication skills.

Alice Santilli

Alice won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award  for her presentation “Domain adaptation and self-supervised learning for surgical margin detection.” After winning this award, she states:

Our work for IMNO was focused on using the relative path algorithm, which created a two-part model that allows for the influence of added data diversity in the form of pretraining task, with a different dataset (BCC) to maximize classification performance of our target dataset, breast cancer. Winning this award is exciting for myself and the team that puts so much time and energy into achieving the full potential of the iKnife. I’m thrilled that others enjoy the work that we do.

Laura Connolly

Laura Connolly, whose research is focused on applying robotic assistance to breast conserving surgery, won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award  for her presentation “A platform for robot-assisted intraoperative imaging in breast conserving surgery. ” Laura comments on what it has meant to win this award. She states:

I have loved attending ImNO for the last two years to share the work we’re doing at Queen’s with the Ontario Imaging community. I am very grateful to be awarded for my presentation in the Image Guided Surgery session and it is very motivating to find out that other people are as excited about this project as I am!

And that’s not all.

Laura Connolly, won another award. She has been noted as the the runner up at Queen’s 3MT and moves to the provincials. Laura says:

It is a huge Honour to place in the Queen’s 3MT competition among the other incredible finalists. This competition was an exciting way to present my own research and learn about the research happening in different departments at Queen’s!

Jessica Rodgers (PDF) won won the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Rising Stars award in the PDF category! Jessica says:

I’m very excited to have been selected for this award — from my past experiences with OICR events, I’ve seen that OICR supports truly high-caliber researchers in Ontario and I’m honoured to be recognized for my potential as a “rising star” among them. This is especially important for me as I’ve found that many people don’t fully realize the role that engineering and computing plays in cancer research, instead focusing on research at the biochemical or cellular levels. I’m particularly passionate about advocating for cancer research paths in these under-recognized fields among youth investigating future career directions and I feel that this recognition of my research potential and community engagement provides me with a greater opportunity to connect with the broader cancer research community and increase exposure for these fields.

 

Congratulations to all our winners and the members of the Med-i and Perk Labs, and lab  directors Parvin Mousavi and Gabor Fichtinger!

Queen’s University’s 2021 Teaching Awards was held virtually on YouTube on March 24th, 2021 at 4:30 pm EDT. We are proud to announce that three award recipients were from the School of Computing.

The recipients are as follows.

Wendy Powley recipient of the  2020 Chancellor A. Charles Baillie Teaching Award

” It is an honour to have been awarded the Chancellor A. Charles Baillie Teaching Award and to be recognized on the same level as several of the top educators at Queen’s University. I am grateful to the School of Computing for giving me the opportunity to work with so many incredibly talented students throughout the years. You continue to inspire me, both during your time at Queen’s and beyond. Many thanks to my colleagues at the School of Computing for the nomination and their support and encouragement which has made this possible.” Wendy Powley

Christian Muise, recipient of the Educational Technology Award (Information Technology Services)

“It’s an honour to be recognized for the work put into re-imagining how AI can be applied in the classroom setting. The contributions that led to the nomination were largely influenced by the feedback and tremendous support from fellow instructors, teaching assistants, and the students themselves — big kudos to everyone for making the semester a memorable one and the course a success! It’s exciting to look back on the new elements created for teaching computing fundamentals, and even more exciting to see the growing list of ideas that will make an impact in both the classroom and research settings.”

– Christian Muise

Taylor Smith recipient of the SGPS Teaching Assistant/Teaching Fellow Excellence Award recipient  (Society of Graduate and Professional Students) 

”  As someone who greatly enjoys education (both as a student and as a teacher), receiving this award feels like the capstone of my teaching experience at Queen’s. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching one course and TAing seven other courses during my PhD, and it means a lot to have had so many opportunities to introduce students to the theoretical side of computing. Even though I’m reaching the end of my grad studies and preparing to begin my career in academia, I’ll always remember the students I met in the School of Computing, and I hope they’ll remember me too. ”  – Taylor Smith

The full ceremony can be viewed here.

Congratulations to all the winners! Continue the excellent work!

On March 12th, Professor Catherine Stinson moderated a panel discussion on bias in AI in response to the American documentary Coded Bias  was directed by Shalini Kantayya. The panelists in this session were  Llana James and Dr. Bretton Fosbrook.

LLana James

LLana James is the AI, Medicine and Data Justice Post-Doctoral Fellow at Queen’s University. She is also wrapping up her doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine. Her research  is focused on the intersection of AI applications in, clinical care, population health, public health data science and the law, and its particular implications for BlackLife. LLana’s recent thinking and research can be found in the Conversation, the Toronto Star, the AI health podcast and the web series COVID  conversations, which is the first and longest running pan-Canadian series on race-based data collection, AI, Big Data, privacy, ethics and equity in health. You can find more at @REDE4BlackLives on Twitter.

Dr. Bretton Fosbrook

Bretton Fosbrook (he/they) is Senior UX Researcher at Wealthsimple, where he creates organizational and institutional change in the service of more just futures. Building from nearly 10 years of experience in knowledge integration and environmental scanning, Bretton works as an advisor to organizations that are ready to respond with purpose to emerging culture, economic, and technology trends. Previously, Bretton was a research fellow at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he developed and led the Working Beyond the Binary project, an initiative seeking to improve the workplace conditions for trans and gender non-conforming people in Canada by helping businesses to understand the changing landscape of gender diversity. Bretton received a PhD (2017) in science and technology studies from York University.

You can watch the full panel discussion here.

Special thanks to all involved for providing an interesting and engaging discussion!