News

Former QSC graduate student Dr. Kathrin Tyryshkin is featured in this Queen’s Gazette article about the Queen’s School of Graduate Studies’ Dissertation Boot Camp.

We are delighted to note from this article in the Queen’s Gazette that the School of Computing has two teams of undergraduate students competing at the world’s level finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup. They are Canadian champions in two of a total of three categories in this competition.

The Canadian Association of Computer Science/Association d’informatique Canadienne has announced that Beatrice (Trixie) Worsley (1921-1972) is an initial recipient of its new Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Worsley was the first female computer scientist in Canada and a founding member of the Department of Computing and Information Science at Queen’s University (now the Queen’s School of Computing). A brief biography is provided here.

David Skillicorn commented today on the case of thousands of CRA employees who fell for a fake phishing email test, in the Globe and Mail and Business News Network.

Congratulations to the QSC graduate students on their successful edition of the Sixth Annual Queen’s Graduate Computing Society Conference. The high quality two-day event was superbly organized and professionally executed. It included research presentations, a poster session, invited keynoted speakers, panel discussions, and of course the ever popular carnival.

Thanks to the organizing committee, Emese Somogyvari, Nisrin Abou-Seido, Marwa Elsayed, Shadi Khalifa and Doug Martin. Thanks, too, to all volunteers, participants, and attendees on an excellent QGCSC 2015!

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Photos by Dave Dove.

A paper from the Queen’s School of Computing Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (Dr. Ahmed Hassan, Director) has won the IEEE Software Best Paper Award for 2015. The latter is believed to be the most prestigious paper award in Software Engineering for industrially relevant research.

The paper titled “An industrial case study on the automated detection of performance regressions in heterogeneous environments” will be presented in the Software Engineering in Practice track at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering.

Based on Derek Foo’s M.Sc. research, the paper documents over 4 years of industrially-relevant work done in collaboration with Blackberry. Co-authors are (ex-sailors) Dr. Bram Adams (now a Professor at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal) and Dr. Zhen Ming Jiang (now a professor at York University). Also members of the winning team are Dr. Ying Zou from ECE and Parminder Flora from Blackberry.

Well done and congratulations, all!

For the second time in the same week, Queen’s School of Computing students are making the headlines. Today’s Gazette has a story on our students who are going to the Global Hackathon in Seoul.

We are delighted to announce that Queen’s School of Computing undergraduate students have won top places in the 2015 Canadian National Imagine Cup Competition organized by Microsoft.

1. In the Innovation Category:

The first place winner is a team of four second year Queen’s School of Computing students, Anastasiya Tarnouskaya (BMCO), Riley Karson (SODE), Julie Lycklama (SODE) and Christopher Thomas (SODE). They built an application meant to provide a safer walking experience for everyone, anywhere and at anytime. Details of the application can be found in this article which appeared when the team won an honourable mention earlier this year in a preliminary round (the Video Pitch Competition).

2. In the World Citizenship Category:

The first place winner is team Eye3 made up of two Queen’s School of Computing students, Jake Alsemgeest (Cmp ’15) and Zaeem Anwar (Cmp ’15), and Queen’s Commerce student Eddie Wang (Com ’18), for their program Ciris, previously the winner of a preliminary round (the Blueprint Challenge Phase).

Congratulations to our exceptional students for this impressive performance.

The School of Computing played host for the second time to the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s East Regional High School Programming Contest on April 25th. Twenty teams of up to four student programmers each participated, attempting to solve four challenging programming problems in the space of three hours. The top five teams from Saturday’s contest are eligible to enter the final in the ECOO programming contest series next month in Toronto. Thanks to all the teams and their coaches for participating. Congratulations to the winning team from Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, and team members Spencer Whitehead, Ryan Torrington-Smith, Kevin Jia, and Willy Lau. Thanks to School of Computing organizer, Richard Linley, to ECOO’s Chris Kulenkamp who acted as principal score-keeper, to the School’s Lynda Moulton for organizing the catering, and to QSC student volunteers Matthew Lougheed, Pall Allison, Hanfeng Chen, Latifa Azzam, and Yosra Azzam for their invaluable assistance with set-up, tear-down, and judging.

Update: The contest received coverage in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

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Photos by Latifa Azzam

On April 8, 2015, School Director Selim Akl hosted the seventh 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: Margaret Lamb
• Ph.D. Research Achievement Award: Weiyi Shang
• Graduate Student Distinguished Service Award: Ben Cecchetto
• Distinguished Graduate Supervision Award: Pat Martin
• Distinguished Service Award: Wendy Powley
• Research Award: Andras Lasso
• Award for Outstanding Contribution to School Life: Danitte Kozai
• Award for Excellence in Teaching Assistance: Danitte Kozai
• Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award: Matthew Holden

Congratulations to the recipients, and many thanks to all those who worked hard to make this day a memorable one.

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Photos by Dave Dove