Scott Grant participated in the Virtual Researcher on Call program last year by doing a video interview that can be used by teachers and students to find out what a career in software engineering could be like. That video is now available.

Congratulations to Queen’s School of Computing researchers Scott Grant, Douglas Martin, James R. Cordy,and David Skillicorn, who received a best paper award at WSE 2011, the 13th IEEE International Symposium on Web Systems Evolution, in Williamsburg, Virginia, September 30, 2011.

The winning paper is entitled: “Contextualized Semantic Analysis of Web Services”.

 

From the Queen’s University News Centre:

It was an incredible summer for twenty-eight undergraduate students in the School of Computing who spent their four months away from classes getting paid to work on acclaimed and forward-thinking research in the labs of some of their professors.

“This summer was a very valuable learning experience, a wonderful opportunity to apply what I’ve been learning in classes,” says Tom Vaughan, a third year undergraduate student in the School of Computing. Mr. Vaughan was working on a computer assisted surgery project that will eventually make the repair of knee cartilage both more precise and less invasive, and was thrilled to be putting his theoretical knowledge to practical use.

But the program is not only beneficial to the students. Selim Akl, Director of the School of Computing, says that the professors benefit just as much as the students do from the summer collaboration.

“It’s a unique partnership that allows us to engage with our younger colleagues,” says Dr. Akl. “They bring in new ideas and a fresh perspective. We couldn’t do it without them.”

Many of the summer positions were funded through Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) programs, primarily the Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA) program, as well as the Discovery and CREATE, programs Some undergraduate researchers receive support from special fellowships and other grants. Students typically apply for employment during the summer of their second or third year to work in a lab with a professor that shares their interests. Once accepted, they begin work as soon as classes end.

For more information about the USRA program visit the NSERC website.

Dear all,

MICCAI 2011, the 14th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, was held last week in Toronto, Canada. MICCAI annually attracts world leading scientists, engineers and clinicians from a wide range of disciplines associated with medical imaging and computer assisted surgery. This year it was the largest gathering of the MICCAI series with about 1,100 attendees.

Members of the Queen’s School of Computing had a pivotal role in this grand event:

• Gabor Fichtinger served as general and program co-chair.
• Randy Ellis and Purang Abolmaesumi served as workshop and tutorial program co-chairs.
• Parvin Mousavi and Purang Abolmaesumi served as Program Committee Members.
• James Stewart managed the scientific review system.
• Andras Lasso and Thomas K. Chen were the event photographers.
• Sacha Robinson managed the airport transportation and help desks.
• More than 15 other Queen’s students and postdocs assisted in running the five-day event flawlessly.

Our researchers, just as every year, were prominently featured at MICCAI:

• Gabor Fichtinger was inducted as MICCAI Society Fellow.
• Ehsan Dehghan was finalist for the Young Scientist Award. (He won the same award last year) .
• The Queen’s team had two podium papers (4% acceptance rate) and five regular papers (30% acceptance rate).

Other pictures from the event are available.

Congratulations to all on an impressive showing by the QSC on the world stage.

Selim

Queen’s School of Computing professor Dr. Roel Vertegaal was featured on Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet on September 21, 2011. The six minute piece provided an excellent overview of the exciting and innovative research conducted daily in the Human Media Lab.

 

 

Students who want to follow in the footsteps of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates can now take a course to support that dream.

“Undergraduate students—in all disciplines—can build profitable companies. However, university support has historically focused on business students. Software Startups, a new course offered by the School of Computing, was created in recognition of the business opportunities available to students who are interested in computer science,” says course instructor Doug Wightman.

While working in small teams to build products, 30 students will also engage in discussions about legal, financial and software development topics with Mr. Wightman and guest speakers.

Software Startups is one of several new courses and academic options available to students this academic year. The School of Computing will also offer Game Design, an introduction to techniques for designing elementary computer games.

• More
• Course Information

Congratulations to Jiro Inoue, Queen’s School of Computing PhD Candidate under the supervision of Dr. James Stewart, for his high-scoring paper that will ensure his presence at the upcoming MICCAI 2011 conference. Jiro’s paper, ” Automated Planning of Computer Assisted Mosaic Arthroplasty,” was selected from 134 applicants, standing in the top 30 of paper review scores.

MICCAI is the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention. It is considered the main annual meeting of world experts in medical imaging and computer assisted surgery. The 14th edition of MICCAI will be held in Toronto, September 18-22, 2011.

http://www.miccai2011.org/
http://www.miccai2011.org/award/miccai-2011-student-travel-awards-decisions-online

Well done Jiro, and we hope you enjoy the conference.

Selim

Queen’s School of Computing Professor David Skillicorn quoted in today’s Maclean’s article “Anonymous morphs into a political movement”
 

Getting the message across

By DAVID SKILLICORN AND CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT

The Republican candidates’ debate in Ames, Iowa, showed what a shaky grasp many of the candidates have on how to be a convincing candidate. Of course, this venue was a difficult one. Its overt purpose was for candidates to explain themselves to the local Republican base ahead of the Ames Straw Poll, but national television coverage made it an opportunity not to be missed to reach out to a wider, much more diverse audience.

Editorial continues at The Whig website.

School of Computing professors Juergen Dingel and James Cordy, Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Thomas Dean and their colleagues from five Ontario universities along with business partners General Motors, IBM Canada, Malina Software Systems and NexJ Systems have been awarded $4.7 million in a new five-year Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence (ORF-RE) grant supporting leading-edge research in model-driven software engineering (MDE).  MDE is a radically new approach to developing software components, products, and services that reduces the complexity of development tasks by (1) simplifying developers’ views of software artifacts via decomposition, abstractions, and models; and (2) automating labour-intensive tasks, via automated processing and transformations of those models.

 

The Ontario Research Excellence project, announced last week by Ontario Minister of Research and Innovation Glen Murray and  led by Prof. Joanne Atlee of the University of Waterloo, extends and enhances the $16.5 million national NSERC Automotive Partnership Canada Network on Engineering Complex Software Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS), announced by the federal government earlier this year.  Prof. Dingel, a world expert in MDE, will focus his research on quality assurance for model transformations, while Profs. Cordy and Dean will leverage their pioneering work in software architecture to the design and implementation of languages for expressing and formalizing software model patterns.

 

References:

MRI ORF-RE Round 5 Projects: http://www.mri.gov.on.ca/english/news/ORF-RE080211_waterloo_bd.asp

Prof. Dingel: http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~dingel/

Prof. Cordy: http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~cordy/

Prof. Dean: http://www.ece.queensu.ca/People/T-R-Dean/index.html