News

On Friday June 25th, a cybersecurity attack took place at KFL&A Public Health. Queen’s School of Computing professor David Skillicorn speaks with Global News Kingston and comments on this recent event.

Read the full story for more information.

Dr. Parvin Mousavi was recently awarded $1.6 million in funding over six years as part of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program.  The project itself aims to enhance the field of medical informatics.

The news of this funding  and the project has gained coverage in the Queen’s Gazette as well as the Kingstonist.

Congratulations Dr. Mousavi!

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!