News

Congratulations to Queen’s School of Computing, Human Media Lab M.Sc. student, Paul Strohmeier (supervised by Dr. Roel Vertegaal) whose HCI paper Mediated Touch: Exploring Embodied Design for Remote Presence won the Top Presentation Award at the 15th International Conference on Presence, held in Vienna, Austria in March 2014.

Congratulations to Queen’s School of Computing Professor David Skillicorn on being awarded a Big Data, Big Impact Grant by The Cancer Institute NSW and The Children’s Hospital at Westmead (Australia) for a project entitled: Generating Actionable Knowledge from Complex Genomic Data for Personalised Clinical Decisions.

David is joined by a team of 10 researchers: McCowage, G., Li, J., Felix Navarro, K.M., Bowden, N., Simoff, S.J., Robertson, T.J., Khan, J., Catchpoole, D.R., Nguyen, Q., Kennedy, P.J.

Our School of Computing researchers have all been successful in their application for NSERC Discovery funding. Congratulations to Drs. Blostein, Hassan, Hassanein, Vertegaal and Zulkernine who will continue their research programs for another five years.

In addition, Dr. Vertegaal was singled out as the recipient of an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement. The purpose of the Accelerator program is to provide additional Discovery funding in order to encourage quicker results in research important to Canada.

Congratulations to Dr. Manuela Kunz on her successful application to the NSERC Research Tools and Instruments program. Dr. Kunz and her co-investigators, Drs. Fichtinger, Ellis, Stewart, Mousavi and Deluzio, will receive funding to purchase valuable equipment for “A system for real-time, portable 3D medical imaging acquisition for interdisciplinary research.” This unique system will support a wide range of research, including image-guided interventions, advanced cartilage repair techniques in knee and ankle joints, computer-aided diagnosis and detection of cancer and human motion analysis. Much needed and well done!

The fashion sense of our very own stylish professor Alan McLeod is featured in this article from the Queen’s Journal.

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!

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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).