The School of Computing would like to congratulate both Wendy Powley and Farhana Zulkernine on their recent promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. Well done to both!
James Cordy receives Lifetime Achievement Award
Congratulations professor emeritus James Cordy for being awarded the 2019 CS-Can/Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) in Computer Science. The award presented by CS-Can/Info-Can recognizes faculty members in Canadian Computer Science Departments/Schools/ Faculties, who have made outstanding and sustained contributions to Canadian computing throughout their careers. The award will be presented in Kingston at the CS-Can/Info-Can annual meeting hosted by the School of Computing in the Fall of 2020.
Original Source:CS-CAN INFO-CAN Lifetime Achievement Awards 2019: James R. Cordy
Throughout his distinguished career, Dr. James R. Cordy has made high-impact research contributions in programming languages, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. His work has been widely published and cited, spun off to numerous companies, and made freely available through widely used public domain tools. His contributions are unique in that he has taken fundamental results in programming language theory, demonstrated how they can be used to build practical software engineering tools, and translated these tools into industrial practice.
Dr. Cordy is Emeritus Professor and past Director of the School of Computing at Queen’s University at Kingston, and a founding member of the Software Technology Laboratory at Queen’s University. Recent academic honours include the 20-year Most Influential Paper Award at SCAM 2019, the IEEE 19th International Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, the 10-year Most Influential Paper Award at ICPC 2018, the IEEE/ACM 26th International Conference on Program Comprehension, the 10-year Most Influential Paper Award at SANER 2018, the IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution & Reengineering, the 2016 Queen’s University Prize for Excellence in Research, and the 10-year Most Influential Paper Award at CASCON 2014, the IBM 24th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.
Dr. Cordy has a long record of active service to the computing community. He is a past member and chair of several national and international awards committees, an emeritus member of IFIP Working Group 2.4, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a Senior Member of the IEEE, an IBM Visiting Scientist and Faculty Fellow, and a registered professional engineer. He is a past member and chair of the NSERC grant selection committee in computer science, past member of the NSERC E.W.R. Steacie fellowships committee, and past member and chair of the Ontario early research awards panel. He has served on scores of program committees and editorial boards, has been invited to give more than 10 keynote addresses, has chaired over 15 ACM and IEEE international conferences, and has refereed thousands of technical papers, books and monographs. He has 43 refereed journal publications, 164 refereed conference papers published in proceedings, and 20 books/chapters.
Dr. Cordy has been active in technology transfer. He served as President and CEO of TXL Software Research Inc. (2000-2003), was the Co-founder, Vice President and Chair of Legasys Corp. (1995-2000) and Co-founder and Director of Holt Software Associates Inc. (1986-2007).
In addition to these, he has actively worked closely with companies such as Bell Northern Research, IBM Canada and General Motors to facilitate their practical use of his research results.
Secure IoT Hackathon 2020
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(Photos by Ashley Taylor and Garrett Elliott)
Three of Canada’s leading technology companies, TELUS, BlackBerry, and Solace, came together with L-SPARK in 2019 to create the Secure IoT Accelerator Program, powered by an innovative Secure IoT Platform. Following the success of that program, the School of Computing teamed up with L-SPARK and the Queen’s Office of Partnerships and Innovation to organize the “Secure IoT Challenge” – a series of events for Queen’s and Royal Military College (RMC) students, faculty, and post-doctaral fellows to participate in a hackathon that took place on the last weekend of February.
The School of Computing took the lead role of this event and provided full technical support to participants. Special thanks to Karim Lounis and Md. Abu Faisal, PhD students in Queen’s Reliable Software Technology (QRST) Group, for running two training workshops and providing continuous mentoring throughout the Hackathon’s main event. Dave Dove, an instructor in the School, acted as IoT expert and sensors guru. The on-campus coordinator of this event was Marwa A. Elsayed, postdoc in QRST. L-Spark also provided business mentoring and technical support for participants through experts from their three corporate partners on-site during the event.
The hackathon gave participants the opportunity to address a variety of challenges and develop a proof of concept of their solutions using the Secure IoT Dev Kit. The Hackathon attracted 40 participants, ranging from 1st year through postdoc. Participants came up with innovative and creative ideas.
Congratulations to winning teams TeleAngels, Efficient Croptracker, Pipefine and Pill-O-Talk, who will each receive mentorship from L-SPARK in addition to up to $5,000 from Queen’s to further develop their concepts.
Several teams also won recognition for specific accomplishments, as follows:
- Vehicle Geofencing took home the Queen’s Partnership & Innovation + Venture Club prize for Most Innovative Solution.
- Library Tracker took home the Queen’s School of Computing prize for Most Technically Innovative Idea.
- Watermelon Tech (Smart Windows) took home the Solace prize for Best Overall Implementation of the Secure IoT Dev Kit.
- TeleAngels was presented with the BlackBerry award for Most Security Conscious Design.
- Pipefine and CrashLytics both received the TELUS prize for Best Use of the TELUS CAT-M1 IoT Network.
The details of these projects are summarized as follows:
- TeleAngels: An IoT-based remote patient monitoring System that aims to provide convenient, efficient, and secure remote healthcare to improve the quality of care for patients with chronic health conditions from the comfort of their home. Team members: Aawista Chaudhry (MSc Student), Mohammed Anas (PhD Student), MD Abou Faisal (PhD Student), Karim Lounis (PhD Student), and Marwa A. Elsayed (Postdoc Fellow) – QRST lab, School of Computing
- Efficient Croptracker: An IoT solution to monitor crop health, soil and environmental conditions for efficient irrigation, pest prevention, and more. Team members: Shaza Ismail Kaoud Abdelaziz (Graduate Student), Mohammad Salloum (Graduate Student), Hayden Banting (Graduate Student), and Ishita Jaiswal (Graduate Student) – Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Pipefine: This project addresses a common issue with pipelines regarding environmental sustainability nowadays which is their susceptibility to spills through various faults. Faults include pipes slacking, rapid changes in temperatures which cause cracking and other possibilities. The project leverages the IoT DevKit to monitor for these conditions and use predictive analysis, emergency reporting and other technical solutions to stop spills before they happen or in the case of a spill mitigate any losses. Team members: Rylen Sampson (Undergrad Student – Mathematics), Emma Landry, Aidan Moffat (Undergrad Student – Computing), and Congwei Chen (Undergrad Student – Computing)
- Pill-O-Talk: The ARMS device will enable users to easily get reminders to take their daily medications as needed, by interpreting the medication label via OCR and generating daily reminders from that which are transmitted via a speaker. Team members: Roberto Ruiz de la Cruz (Undergrad Student – Computing), Shannon Chessman (Undergrad Student – Queen’s Centre for Advanced Computing), Jolene Lammers (Undergrad Student – Queen’s Centre for Advanced Computing), Evan Arsenault ((Undergrad Student – Queen’s Centre for Advanced Computing), Josh Wade (Undergrad Student – Applied Math Engineering), and Cooper Leong (Undergrad Student – Math and Eng. Systems and Robotics)
- Vehicle Geofencing: This project keeps a track of license plates using machine vision techniques and generating a database of the GPS location of the vehicles tracked. The database could be used by the police department in the investigation. Team members: Manudeep Pendurthi (Graduate Student – Mechanical and Materials Engineering), Junaid Charaniya (Graduate Student – ECE), Shashi Suman (Graduate Student – ECE), Anubhav Bhatti (Graduate Student – ECE), Michael Kim (Undergraduate Student – Physics), Kamal Andani (Graduate Student – ECE)
- Library Tracker: This project counts the number of students in each floor in the library. Team members: DongJun Jin, Andy Lee, Yueyang Liu, Yanyu Yang, and Tongxu Ge (Undergrad Students – School of Computing)
- Watermelon Tech (Smart Windows): This solution is a Secure IoT system involving a web app that connects to control and detect environmental information about your windows. Team members: Evan Kilburn, Kevin Quijalvo, Ze Hao Lu, Callum Kipin, Yifan Wen, and Brandon Ye (Undergrad Students – School of Computing)
- CrashLytics: This solution Keeps track of cars on the road and notifies drivers to take appropriate action when a collision is imminent. Team members: Raed Fayad (Undergraduate Student – ECE) and Subhranil Majumder.
Special thanks to the judges:
- Steven Ding, Assistant Professor, Queen’s School of Computing
- Jim Banting, Assistant Vice-Principal, Queen’s Partnerships & Innovation
- Janice Mady, Director, Queen’s Partnerships & Innovation
- Rey Buquid, Technology Strategy, CTO Office,TELUS
- Roop Mukherjee, Principal Software Architect, BlackBerry
- Leo Lax, Executive Managing Director, L-SPARK
David Skillicorn comments on Ontario police’s use of Clearview AI facial recognition software
Dr. Skillicorn says the tool may seem attractive to police detectives and could significantly reduce their workload, but points out that their accuracy is never as good as claimed.
Read more on Radio Canada International (article is in French): No investigation into the use of facial recognition in Ontario
Congratulations Queen’s Computing Researchers on Funding Success
We are pleased to congratulate the following faculty members on recent funding success:
Farhana Zulkernine who has been awarded NSERC CRD funding for her project “Learning Distributed Patterns from Multimodal Streaming Data” with industry partner IBM.
Gabor Fichtinger of the Perk Lab has been awarded funding from CANARIE in support of his 3D Slicer open source software platform that facilitates exploration, evaluation and clinical translation of medical data visualization and image-guided therapy.
New faculty members Steven Ding, Ting Hu, Amber Simpson, and Yuan Tian have received Faculty of Arts and Science funding support for research infrastructure to establish leading-edge labs at Queen’s.
Computing Students Win Mayor’s Innovation Challenge
Congratulations to our students Julia McPolin, 4th year Cognitive Science Student, and David Kubik, 4th year Software Design Student, for winning the 3rd Annual Mayor’s Innovation Challenge. They have been awarded a four-month paid summer internship through the City of Kingston and a $10,000 budget to grow their project.
Learn more about their project in this article by the City of Kingston.
David Skillicorn weighs in on whether Huawei contributed to the demise of Nortel
Dr. Skillicorn says it’s entirely plausible that technology robbed and copied by a rival was the final straw that took down an already struggling company.
Read more in the National Post: Did Huawei bring down Nortel? Corporate espionage, theft, and the parallel rise and fall of two telecom giants
Welcome to our new faculty members
A warm welcome to our two new faculty members Dr. Ting Hu who joined the School of Computing this Fall 2019 and Dr. Christian Muise who joins the School of Computing this Winter 2020.
Dr. Ting Hu
Dr. Ting Hu received her PhD in computer science from Memorial University in 2010. Afterward, she completed her postdoctoral training in computational genetics from Dartmouth College. Dr. Hu has been nominated Best Paper Awards repeatedly from top international conferences in the field of evolutionary computation, including ACM GECCO and EuroGP. She has also served as program chairs for these conferences.
As a faculty member in the School of Computing, Dr. Ting Hu’s expertise will contribute to the broadening of fundamental AI research. By developing AI algorithms that are more transparent and interpretable, Dr. Hu will continue to enhance the applications of AI and machine learning techniques in biomedicine.
Research Interests
Evolutionary computation, Machine learning, Complex networks, Computational genetics, Complex diseases
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvf5tqAqRYM&t=95s;w=560&h=315]
Dr. Christian Muise
Dr. Christian Muise completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2014 with the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group in the area of Automated Planning. After graduating, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Agentlab studying techniques for multi-agent planning and human-agent collaboration. Subsequently, he was a research fellow with the MERS group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory studying decision making under uncertainty. Most recently, Dr. Muise was a Research Scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, where he researched data-driven techniques for inducing behavioral insight and lead a project devising next-generation dialogue agents.
As a faculty member in the School of Computing, Dr. Muise’s lab will explore the ways we can either specify or learn models of the world, enabling the efficient creation and analysis of autonomous systems. By bridging the fields of symbolic reasoning and machine learning, the lab will explore the frontier of what is possible with modern AI systems.
Research Interests
Artificial intelligence, Automated planning, Model understanding, learning, and acquisition, Goal-oriented dialogue systems
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPfIDuCGnk&t=1s;w=560&h=315]
David Skillicorn discusses the risk of package theft on Global TV National
Dr. Skillicorn says people stealing packages are taking a risk because they don’t know if the homeowner has a camera installed.
A U.S. study shows over 11 million households have fallen victim to thieves stealing packages that are being delivered and dropped on your doorstep. Now a Canadian company has come up with a new design to secure your orders. Mike Drolet reports.
Source on Global TV National: New delivery pods aim to thwart porch pirates
Convocation Fall 2019
Congratulations to the Computing Class of 2019 who graduated on Friday, November 15th, 2019 at 10:00 am in Grant Hall.
We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!
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(Photos by Doug Martin)