News

The Tri-Council Research Expense Eligibility & Documentation Guide is now available.

The next Queen’s Game Developers Club meeting is set for Wednesday,
February 2nd, at 8:00pm! Come and join the fun in Goodwin 247.

If you haven’t heard of us yet, we’re an AMS ratified club devoted to providing an environment to foster the development of games, whether electronic or not, through discussion and mentoring. We provide regular presentations about topics including life in the professional games industry, issues with game design and theory, and other related issues. If you have heard of us, then sorry for the spam. Please add us to your block-forever list, and avert your eyes if you see us walking down the hallway. (Seriously though, this is the only time we’ll be sending to social this term; we have some new students and wanted to make this computing-related resource available.)

We’ve booked Flash game developer Sash Mackinnon to join us remotely from the sunny utopia of Australia! Sash has created some visually stunning, and very addictive games. You can check them all out on his site:

bitbattalion.com

This meeting is going to be a good one, so come on out! Goodwin 247, 8:00pm, Wednesday, February 2nd. We have an announcement list if you’d like to be kept aware of future meetings and other events, so please take a look at the homepage. http://qgdc.ca/

And last but not least, if you were unable to make it to our last meet, you can now enjoy Jeffrey Yim’s presentation on his experience in the game industry on our website.

Work-integrated learning preparing students for changing labour market, study finds: Work-integrated learning (WIL) such as co-operative education, apprenticeships, and internships can help Ontario post-secondary students respond to rapid change in the Ontario labour market, according a report prepared by Academica Group and commissioned by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. In the first phase of a study of institutional and employer attitudes toward WIL, both groups view it as an important part of the student experience, preparing students to enter the labour market with relevant, transferable, and marketable skills. They cite career preparation and improved employment prospects as the top motivating factor for students. Among PSE institutions surveyed, strengthening linkages with community and enhancing institutional reputation are the most significant benefits of WIL, while for employers the key attributes are access to highly motivated and creative students and improved productivity

Research summary

1.  Undergraduate achievements. A graduate from our Biomedical Computing program was this year’s winner of the Governor General’s Medal for achieving the highest academic standing in a bachelor degree program, across all disciplines.  The research work of a third-year undergraduate attracted a tremendous amount of positive publicity from national and international media, including the CBC, Wired Magazine, and the NSERC web site, and earned a tip of the hat from a reigning World Chess Champion. Another undergraduate was the recipient of a prestigious CRA Undergraduate Research Award, placing in sixth position over all categories, being the only Canadian in the top 40, and enjoying the company of winners from Princeton, Harvard, Rice, Tufts, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, and the like.

2.     Undergraduate enrollment. Our undergraduate enrollment is up. The number of first-year students is now twice that of three years ago and very close to twice the University’s enrollment target for the School. Fully 35.8% of our undergraduates, and 37.5% of our instructors, are women.

3.     Undergraduate programs and activities. The School’s program prerequisite charts received national attention. Our undergraduate students organized and executed an excellent orientation week, earning praise from both the Administration as well as their peers.

4.     Graduate students. Many of the School’s graduate students completed their degrees successfully and moved on, we welcomed a wonderful new group of excellent graduate students, and our graduate program maintained its positions as the largest (and best!), its members making an impact, winning awards, and organizing the first Graduate Computing Students Conference.

5.     Research contributions. Our researchers had an impressive presence in terms of journal publications, as well as at international gatherings of professionals in biomedical computing, communication networks, databases, human computer interaction, knowledge discovery, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. A colleague in the School earned a prestigious Research Chair from Cancer Care Ontario.

6.     Research Grants. Substantial research grants were received from the main granting agencies, including NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR, CFI, OMRI, and ORF. The latest funding received was a major award from NSERC, General Motors and IBM, intended to make automobiles safer, more reliable, and more secure.

7.     Interdisciplinarity. The School continues to be a model of interdisciplinarity; our collaborators, in Canada and around the planet, come from electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, biology, physiology, anatomy, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, politics, sociology, business, medicine, kinesiology, art, drama, film,  and music.

8.     Service. We are not only citizens of the world, but we are also good citizens. We respond to every request for service from the Faculty of Arts and Science and from the University. We offer courses in Continuing Studies and in Enrichment Programs. Through outreach activities, we are involved with the local community, at elementary and secondary schools, as well as at organizations such as the H’art School, and we hosted the first Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing.

9.     New colleagues. The ranks of our award-winning staff were enriched by the arrival of several wonderful new members, including instructors, administrative assistants, research associates, and research adjuncts.

10.    A new lab. After three and a half years of preparation, design, and planning, construction work is finally set to begin on a world class facility, a School laboratory in Jackson Hall, the new Human Media Lab.
Happy holidays everyone and best wishes for 2011.

Selim

Please follow this link for an article featuring Professor Roel Vertegaal of the Queen’s School of Computing. The Communications of the ACM article covers research in the area of eye communication.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1859211&coll=DL&dl=ACM&retn=1#Fulltext

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2011-ranking-200-jobs-best-worst

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/10-best-jobs-2011

Software Engineer, a job that involves the design and creation of software for everything from operating systems to cell phone “apps” to interactive games, ranks as the best job of 2011, according to this year’s Jobs Rated report. Surveying 200 different professions across a wide variety of industries, skill levels and salary ranges, Jobs Rated researchers determine their rankings according to five core criteria: Work Environment, Physical Demands, Outlook, Income and Stress. The goal of each Jobs Rated report is to determine how gratifying each job will be for a majority of workers – not just those who are famous or exceptional – so they can be sorted into a list of the “worst” and “best” professions

What helped Software Engineer capture the title of America’s Best Job? While many factors push a career to the top of the rankings, the strong performance of Software Engineer this year can be attributed to two emerging industries: web applications and cloud computing. A proliferation of companies making applications for smartphones and tablets, along with the push to develop “cloud” software hosted entirely online, has made the job market for Software Engineers broader and more diverse. And a diverse job market brings improvements in stress factors such as Growth Potential and Competitiveness, as workers become less beholden to employers or vulnerable to outsourcing. In fact, the stress ranking for Software Engineer improved 10 spots this year, jumping from 25^th to 15^th place overall.

The School of Computing has 35.8 per cent female enrolment, putting it well ahead of the national average and making it a leader in North America.

“I can’t see any other school – unless it has a specialized program – having the same female student numbers as Queen’s. It’s quite impressive,” says Wendy Powley, School of Computing research associate and adjunct lecturer.

A recent study found that 11.2 per cent of students with bachelor’s degrees in computer science are women and most computer schools have female enrolment numbers in the 10 to 20 per cent range.

Queen’s has surpassed those numbers in large part because of the Women in the School of Computing, a group under Ms Powley’s leadership that supports female students and tries to encourage younger women to consider studying computer science when they graduate from high school.

Low female recruitment can be blamed on the image problem Ms. Powley refers to as the “geek factor” – people think computer students sit behind a desk all day and write code. This is simply not true.

School of Computing Director Selim Akl is hoping activities being conducted at Queen’s for National Computer Science Education Week will change that stereotype.

Computers are being integrated into many other programs not normally associated with keyboards and laptops. The School of Computing offers programs in biomedical computing, cognitive science (which combines computer science with psychology, philosophy and linguistics), and computing and the creative arts.

“You can be an artist and a computer scientist; you can be a specialist in computer-assisted surgery and a computer scientist. The field of computing is bound by your imagination. You can do whatever you want with this new technology and that is making the field so exciting,” says Dr. Akl. “I cannot imagine an endeavour in the future that doesn’t involve computers.”

Computing offers men and women many career options, as the industry has gotten past the dot-com bust of 2000. Today, some fourth-year computing students at Queen’s are being offered full-time jobs even before they graduate.

National Computer Science Education Week.

photo: Wendy Powley (bottom right) and other women in the School of Computing have been actively trying to recruit more women to the program.

We are planning an open house on Friday December 10, 2010 as part of the “Computer Science Education Week” festivities.  The event will run from 11 to 3pm.  Most of our labs will be running demos during that time and we will have guides to get you around the School.

We also have three other sites to visit which I am sure will be very exciting – the Human Media Lab – where they work on the next generation of human-computer interaction technology (http://hml.queensu.ca), the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (http://research.cs.queensu.ca/home/ahmed/home/) and the EQUIS Lab where they study computer gaming and collaboration technologies (http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~graham/equis.html).

We also have several biomedical computing labs working on computer-assisted diagnosis and surgery including orthopedic surgery, brachytherapy and cardiology.  Roughly 30% of the graduates from our Biomedical Computing program get into Medical School!

Hopefully our Open House will provide an intriguing view into modern computer science.

Collaborative Research & Training Experience (CREATE) in Bone & Joint Health Technologies

Apparatus set up.

Though graduate students Sarah Fleming, Andrew Dickinson and Amy VanBerlo come from very different academic backgrounds, they have one important thing in common: a tendency towards unconventional thinking. It’s for that reason that the three were selected (along with a handful of others) to participate in the Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) in Bone and Joint Health Technologies, an initiative of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) that was first launched at Queen’s in 2009.

Hosted in the Human Mobility Research Centre (HMRC), and affiliated with Kingston General Hospital, the program brings together graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (along with a small handful of undergrads) in a bid to generate interdisciplinary research around human mobility. “We’re basically fusing various disciplines in science and engineering with an aim of developing bone and joint health technology,” explains Dickinson, a second year Master’s student working on a degree in computing. “The idea is that they can get all of us from different disciplines together, and that we can show technology to one another that we might not have known about otherwise, in a bid to improve research and to make more of a clinical impact.”

“It’s also a way to streamline the whole research process,” explains Fleming, a second year Master’s student in the department of chemical engineering. “Typically research meets a dead end — it doesn’t always make it to clinical situations. But we’re trying to incorporate doctors and medical residents into the research process. They are giving us input. They’re telling us why things will or won’t work.” Fleming’s research is in tissue engineering — her work is with the growth of stem cells derived from fatty tissues on a 3-D structure also derived from fatty tissues. Thanks to her work through the HMRC-CREATE program, when she graduates, Fleming will be one of the first students at Queen’s to finish with a specialty in biomedical engineering.

With his interest in computer programming, Dickinson (who started his academic career in life sciences) points out that he and Fleming would not have the chance to work together under normal academic circumstances. “I don’t know anything about what Sarah does,” he laughs, “but (this program is about) being able to fuse the ideas that any one of us have, in the hopes that new research can be driven from that.” Dickinson’s work is around medical imaging — essentially bridging the gap between the worlds of computers and medicine. “A lot of software packages are targeted at medical people, but they aren’t programmers. They aren’t going to learn to write highly advanced (programming language) C++,” he explains. “My work is in abstracting the code away, and reinterpreting it with useability … so a program can, in my software, be “written” as a flow chart.” He then laughs again when he reflects on the program as a whole: “I can fuse both my nerdly passions — computers and medicine — in one place!”

Fellow Master’s computing student, VanBerlo, a graduate of the Queen’s Biomedical Computing undergraduate degree program, is also interested in bridging the gap between technology and medicine. “I’m developing a technology that allows the assessment of a patient after surgery.,” she explains. “More particularly, I am looking at minor nerve damage that occurs during surgery, any procedure that requires an incision or cut really” As part of her research, VanBerlo has developed a camera system and accompanying software which she says is a “non invasive, extremely accurate and reproducible tool to image patients and to track their conditions.” She hopes, ultimately, that her work will decrease the extent of surgically caused nerve damage in patients.

All three agree that the program’s strength is in its potential for collaboration. “It’s about just being aware,” says Fleming, “because we don’t know half of the technology that exists! How a computer can be involved in a process, for example. If it’s a repeatable task, then you can get a computer to do it, but you can’t do that if you don’t know that the technology exists!”

VanBerlo applauds the program’s unconventional approach. “It’s given me perspective on what’s out there,” she explains, “and not just in terms of technology and paradigms of thinking, but it also helps me get away from academia and focus on what I can do for a career in a practical sense.” “The program is definitely developing us as people,” adds Fleming. “We’re running research groups, managing projects — they are all skills that you can use in the real world, or in the industry.” Fleming says that since participating in the HRMC-CREATE program she as been able to go on orthopedic rounds and has been able to observe surgeries in the operating room. “They are all opportunities that you wouldn’t normally get as a grad student,” she says with a smile. “The program really has everything going on!”

Original Story here:

http://www.queensu.ca/sgs/forstudents/stories/resources/hmrc.html

Dear all,

I am delighted to announce that Queen’s School of Computing undergraduate student Laura Bartha (4th year, Biomedical Computing) has been selected by the Computing Research Association as a finalist of a 2011 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, for her work on thermal ablation in percutaneous surgery, under the supervision of Gabor Fichtinger.

Laura’s win is all the more impressive when one notes that the top 17 award recipients come from Princeton, Harvard, Rice, Tufts, Virginia Tech, Yale, Queen’s, Vanderbilt, Rochester, Minnesota, Texas A&M, William and Mary, Berkeley, San Diego, and Brown.

An excerpt from the citation reads:

“This year’s nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected a Finalist from this group. On behalf of the Computing Research Association, we are pleased to have you as a member of the computing research community, and wish you the best for the future.”

Congratulations Laura, we are very proud of you.

Selim