News

The Queen’s News Centre features an article highlighting the work of the School’s own Ahmed Hassan. Dr. Hassan has been awarded the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Software Analytics. Read the whole story here.

Area high schools entered five teams of students in the fifth annual programming contest hosted by the Queen’s School of Computing, and held on March 31, in co-operation with the Limestone District School Board, the Algonquin & Lakeshore District Catholic School Board, and the Upper Canada District School Board. The contest consisted of a set of four programming problems which the teams had to try to solve in three hours. The winning team was from Frontenac Secondary School in Kingston, coached by Mr. Mark Lee, and second place was taken by the team from Brockville Collegiate Institute, coached by Mr. Rod MacDonald. Well done, all, and thanks to contest organizers Richard Linley and Lynda Moulton!

[slideshow_deploy id=’1842′]

Photos by Dave Dove.

Queen’s School of Computing alumna, Mireille Gomes, is mentioned in an article on “experience” in the current issue of Maclean’s Magazine:

“Mireille Gomes, a biomedical computing graduate, landed a QUIP placement in 2006-07 with an electronic health records software company in Austria, which led to a Ph.D. at Oxford University, an internship at the World Health Organization and eventually full-time work in electronic health records at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.”

A CHRP Grant has been awarded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the project “RF Time Series Flashlight for Targeted Prostate Biopsy”, led by Queen’s School of Computing Professor Parvin Mousavi. Dr. Mousavi (PI) and her colleagues propose a turnkey technology that uses multi-parametric imaging to improve the detection of high grade cancer in clinical interventions.

NSERC and BlackBerry are committing $2.5 Million to support the research of Dr. Ahmed Hassan, NSERC BlackBerry Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering.

Earlier today, Dr. Hassan was named a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Software Analytics. BlackBerry and NSERC will also co-fund a long-term grant to support research projects at the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab. SAIL’s research under the directorship of Dr. Hassan focuses on providing analytical approaches to support the development and operation of Ultra Large Scale (ULS) systems.

ULS systems power much of the software that we use on a daily basis. The world’s banking systems, the Blackberry platform, the GM OnStar network, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Xbox Live and the World of Warcraft are examples of ULS systems. This new generation of distributed systems poses problems of scale, speed, availability, reliability, privacy and security that dwarf those of traditional enterprise systems. With so much economic and social activity depending on ULS systems, they must operate flawlessly all the time. They require different methods to create, manage and maintain.

The School of Computing is home of the world’s largest training and research efforts for ULS systems. The School currently offers an NSERC CREATE Graduate Specialization in Ultra-Large Scale Software Systems. The specialization offers students the opportunity to enhance their professional and developmental skills through practical and industrially motivated research. The School also leads several multi-institute research efforts that focus on the development of next generation ULS services (e.g., the ORF ULySSes project).

Queen’s School of Computing Honorary Doctorate Alumna, Dr. Maria Klawe, has just been included in the list of the 50 greatest leaders in the world. She is in the company of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bill Clinton and Pope Francis in the latest issue of Fortune magazine.

Queen’s School of Computing student Eril Berkok is featured in the recently released Council of Ontario Universities Report on Experiential Learning, in which he shares his experience as an intern as part of the Queen’s Internship Program (see page 20). Eril’s profile is the only one for Queen’s in the COU document.

The Professional Internship Option is a distinguishing feature of the School of Computing programs, and we are the only unit in the Faculty of Arts and Science to offer this experiential learning opportunity to our Honours students.

“What do Birds Flocking and Proteins Folding have in Common? Hazem Ahmed brings Swarm Intelligence to Bioinformatics” appears on the web site of the Queen’s School of Graduate Studies. Read it here!

Congratulations to Drs. Gabor Fichtinger (Laboratory for Percutaneous Surgery, Queen’s School of Computing) and Karol Miller (Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory, UWA School of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering) on their successful application under the Queen’s Visitors to Partner Institutions of the Matariki Network of Universities fund. Their new collaboration will integrate world-class research in image-guided surgery navigation (Queen’s) and soft tissue biomechanical deformation modeling (UWA) with the goal of significantly advancing the field of computer-assisted neurosurgery. We wish them every success in their new partnership.

The Queen’s News Centre published an article about the innovative Active Learning classrooms in Ellis Hall. The School’s own Dave Dove and his team-based learning approach are featured. Read all about it here.