News

David was interviewed by the media following the attacks on the Toronto and Ottawa police websites.

Queen’s School of Computing Perk lab undergraduates Maggie Hess and Vinyas Harish presented their research at the Canadian Undergraduate Conference on Healthcare (CUCOH). Being accepted for oral podium presentation was quite a distinction for our young undergraduates.

Also noteworthy: Maggie received the First Place Prize for oral presentations.

Three teams of the Queen’s Programming Group participated in the IEEE Xtreme programming competition.  Internationally there were 1,720 teams entered into the final ranking, 69 of which were from Canada.

The Queen’s School of Computing Team made up of QSC graduate students Kiran Sundarav and Aparna Bhat  placed first at Queen’s, 14th in Canada, and 194th internationally.

The Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing (ONCWIC) conference was created by the School of Computing’s Women in the School of Computing (WISC) group, and held for the first time in Kingston in 2010. The conference has since grown as it traveled to other universities across the province (Toronto, Western, Waterloo). Its fifth edition was held recently in Guelph, and we share with you the report below prepared by our own Wendy Powley, founder of ONCWIC.

The annual WISC roadtrip to the Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing (ONCWIC 2014) conference took place on October 24/25th. The conference was held by (and at) the University of Guelph. This is an exciting event for our group as we were the founders of the conference in 2010 (Since then the conference has been run annually with a different university hosting each year). Queen’s School of Computing was well represented at the conference by 60 enthusiastic attendees.

The conference began on Friday evening with dinner and a keynote delivered by the Honourable Liz Sandals, the Minister of Education for Ontario. Following dinner, a large number of attendees took part in a Scratch programming contest, making some very impressive games. Two groups from Queen’s won prizes – Megan Michaelis, Fiona Sinclair and Catherine Chisnel won the “Most Progressive Game” award and Katherine Beaulieu and Grace Underwood won “Most Addictive Game”.

Saturday featured a career fair, workshops on resume writing and technical interviews as well as technical talks, hands-on technical workshops using Arduino and Raspberry Pi and plenty of networking opportunities. The poster competition was won by our own Lili Wang for her PHD work on  Protein-interaction-network-based Pathway Analysis. Lili will enjoy an all expense trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Houston in 2015 courtesy of the ACM-W who sponsored this prize.

It is exciting to see the conference not only thriving, but expanding rapidly. We have doubled our registration (300 this year) and this year we had representation from 12 different educational institutions (plus some secondary schools) and 23 different companies, many who were sponsors and who were actively recruiting at the event.

Check out these terrific photos from the weekend!

The School of Computing’s David Skillicorn was mentioned in a special writeup in the Toronto Star titled “A Hack in Time”, which chronicles some landmark events in cyber crime from the early 70s to today.

Read the whole story here.

Jenny Zou (cross-appointed from ECE)  was named the 2014 CAS Faculty Fellow at CASCON Tuesday. Jenny was honoured for her research with CAS and for her work organizing and running the Emerging Technology Track at this year’s CASCON.

This morning at CASCON 2014, the 24th Annual International Conference on
Computer Science and Software Engineering sponsored by IBM CAS Research,
Queen’s School of Computing Professors James Cordy and Thomas Dean (ECE cross-appointee),
along with their former student Nikita Synytskyy (now at Amazon), were awarded the
“Most Influential Paper” award for their CASCON 2004 paper
“Practical Language-Independent Detection of Near-Miss Clones”.

The Most Influential Paper is awarded each year to the contribution published in the
conference ten years ago that is judged to have had the greatest overall academic
and practical impact on the field. In addition to its 63 citations and 464 direct
descendant paper citations, the Awards Committee noted several references to the
paper in recently granted patents in the data management domain, beyond the
originally targeted source code and web site analysis domains, which provided further
evidence of the continued impact and industrial applicability of the work.

Queen’s School of Computing Ph.D. candidate Lili Wang of the Med-i lab (Dr. Parvin Mousavi, Director), won the first prize for the best poster award at the Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing conference, held this past weekend at the University of Guelph. Her poster was related to her PhD research on Protein-interaction-network-based Pathway Analysis.  The prize is an all-expense paid trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Houston, Texas in 2015.

Lili’s PhD research will also be featured as a podium presentation at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing in 2015.

The two Fall Preview events for 2014 were held on October 25 and November 8 in the Biosciences complex at Queen’s. Once again, many thousands of visitors attended.

The School of Computing was represented by a terrific group of volunteers who donated their time and efforts generously and enthusiastically, by putting together the most impressive display of demos among all participating departments, thereby contributing significantly to the School’s undergraduate recruiting campaign. Thanks, and well done, to all our volunteers.

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Photos by Ben Hall.

Five School of Computing students will be going to Florida next winter to present the results of their research in Biomedical Computing. Vinyas Harish, Maggie Hess, Mark Schumacher, Kyle Sunderland, and Matt Lougheed, all of the PERK Lab, have had their papers accepted for presentation at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference to be held in Orlando, February 21-26, 2015.

The SPIE Medical Imaging conference is one of the largest international conferences on medical imaging. The prestige of this conference is further demonstrated by the fact that each fully refereed 10-page accepted paper is published in the conference proceedings, and indexed on PubMed for the medical research community. “I am immensely proud of our undergraduates” said Dr. Gabor Fichtinger, Director of the Perk Lab.

The full authorship and title for each paper is as follows:

V Harish, T Ungi, A Lasso, A Macdonald, S Nanji, G Fichtinger, “Intraoperative visualization and assessment of electromagnetic tracking error” (Vinyas is now a second year undergraduate; he completed this work and submitted his paper while a first year student)

M Hess, T. Looi, A Lasso, G Fichtinger, J Drake, “Quantification of intraventricular blood clot in MR-guided focused ultrasound surgery” (Maggie is now in a third year undergraduate; she completed this work and submitted her paper while a second year student)

M Schumacher, A Lasso, I Cumming, A Rankin, C Falkson, LJ Schreiner, C Joshi, G Fichtinger, “Patient-specific surface mould applicators for high-dose-rate brachytherapy” (Mark is now a fourth year undergraduate; he completed this work and submitted his paper while a third year student)

K. Sunderland, B. Woo, C. Pinter, and G. Fichtinger, “Reconstruction of surfaces from planar contours through contour interpolation” (Kyle is now a fourth year undergraduate; he completed this work and submitted his paper while a third year student)

M Lougheed, G Fichtinger, T Ungi, “Evaluation metrics for bone segmentation in ultrasound” (Matt is now a first year Master’s student; he completed this work and submitted his paper while a fourth year undergraduate).