News

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

Hundreds of interested faculty, students, and staff gathered at the Biosciences Complex on Wednesday April 1st for the Queen’s School of Computing’s annual exhibition of Creative Computing: Art, Games, and Research. The event highlighted the work of the School’s undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on demos, presentations, and posters from a selection of our courses, with topics including Game Design and Game Technology, Computing and the Creative Arts, 4th year projects, Human Computer Interaction, and more. Congratulations and thanks to the organizers and participants.

Here’s a link to a Queen’s Gazette story about Creative Computing 2015: http://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/computing-students-flex-creative-muscles.

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Photos by Dave Dove.

Congratulations to Queen’s School of Computing Professor, Dr. Gabor Fichtinger, and his co-applicants Drs. Ellis, Kunz, Stewart, Mousavi and Petrof on their successful NSERC Research Tools and Instrument application. NSERC funding will bring a Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometer (REIMS) to the Human Mobility Research Centre (HMRC).

The REIMS is unique technology, available from only one manufacturer in the world, that will place Queen’s surgical navigation researchers at the forefront of technology development and translation.

HMRC is a joint Queen’s-KGH facility that enables interdisciplinary research in health, computer science and engineering.

We are sure to see some interesting work from this award. Well done!

Congratulations to Team 1 from St. Theresa Catholic Secondary School, Belleville, and coach Mr. Daniel Tie Ten Quee for the team’s win in this year’s School of Computing Invitational High School Programming Contest. St. Theresa 1 narrowly defeated second place Team 42 41 40 from Frontenac Secondary School, Kingston, for the win. Thanks to Mr. Tie, and to coaches Mr. Mark Lee (Frontenac Secondary School), Mr. Jon Swaine (Sydenham High School), and Mr. Rod MacDonald (Brockville Collegiate Institute) for bringing teams to compete in this year’s very successful contest in which 35 students in 9 teams tried to solve four programming problems in three hours. The top teams from the March 30 contest will compete in the Educational Computing Organization Of Ontario’s East Regional Contest, which is also being hosted by the School of Computing, at Queen’s on April 25. Thanks and well done to contest organizer, Richard Linley, to Lynda Moulton for arranging the catering, and to School of Computing student volunteers, Clara Huh and Gabrielle Quilliam.

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Photos by R. Linley and C. Huh

David was interviewed by the Toronto Star on the subject of Target’s $10 million settlement for a data breach being a wake-up call to other businesses.

Queen’s School of Computing Professor, Dr. Ahmed E. Hassan, has been named  CACS/AIC Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher for 2014. This award recognizes highly significant contributions, particularly to research. The prizes are sponsored by The Canadian Association of Computer Science/Association d’Informatique Canadienne, Canada’s national computer science academic organization.

Congratulations to Professor Hassan!