Tag: graduate > Queen's School of Computing

2023-24 SGSPA Award in Leadership, Innovation, And Community Engagement Awarded to Victoria Armstrong

The annual award recognizes graduate student achievement in leadership, innovation, and community engagement. The award winners are selected to show demonstrable impact across a variety of areas, such as: creating and disseminating knowledge that supports societal improvements, promoting public interests as a social impact leader, entrepreneurial achievements, and civic engagement.

We sincerely congratulate Victoria on this recognition of her contributions to the School of Computing and student life at Queen’s as a whole!

Many will recognize Victoria from her involvement in the Graduate Computing Society, where Victoria has played an active role since the first year of her Master’s program in 2020. After first working for GCS as School Life Officer, then as Vice-President of Operations, in the Fall of 2022 Victoria was elected as the Graduate Computing Society President for the 2022 – 2023 academic year.

In addition to her work as GCS president, Victoria is a mentor through A&S mentorship program, a long standing member of orientation committee, and a highly ranked TA.

Recently, Victoria and a group of other STEM students have piloted a program leading TA/TF I-EDIAA training sessions to further the I-EDIAA practices available in their respective departments. Thus far, 50 students have participated in these workshops, with more scheduled in the upcoming months.

Victoria’s contributions to the academic, social, and cultural life at the School of Computing have received wide recognition this year. In addition to the SGSPA Award, Victoria was recently celebrated at the QSC Award Ceremony with the Ian A. Macleod Award and the Distinguished Service Award. Congratulations, Victoria!

Mohammad Zulkernine Receives 2022 Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision

QSC is delighted to announce that Dr. Mohammad Zulkernine was presented with the 2022 Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision at the Spring Convocation ceremony this June. The award reflects Dr. Zulkernine’s proven ability to inspire students academically and in their careers and guide the overall culture of excellence at QSC and at Queen’s. Dr. Zulkernine is the current Graduate Chair at QSC and has a long-standing reputation for being a supportive and encouraging mentor to his graduate students, which the School previously recognized in 2016 with the internal QSC Distinguished Graduate Supervision award.

The Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision is awarded to supervisors who demonstrate outstanding excellence in advising, monitoring, and mentoring graduate students. The School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs annually recognizes two leading graduate supervisors at the University. The 2023 recipients are Dr. Zulkernine and Jeffrey Brison, Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Program and Professor of History.

Dr. Zulkernine joined the School in 2013 and has mentored 13 postdoctoral fellows, 22 doctoral and 44 master’s students since then. Dr. Zulkernine was the Canada Research Chair in Software Dependability from 2011 to 2021. He leads the Queen’s Reliable Software Technology (QRST) research group and is currently focused on building secure software for cyber-physical systems such as connected and autonomous vehicles and other IoT applications. His supervised students have won conference best paper awards, the Governor General Gold Medal, PhD Research Achievement, and Distinguished Master’s Thesis awards.

Click here to read the original award announcement in the Queen’s Gazette.

Excellence in Computing: 3 Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards from BAM Lab in 2021

Though 2021 wasn’t an easy year for the School of Computing – with the transition to remote learning and working – our students and faculty continued to demonstrate their excellence. The Big Data Analytics and Management (BAM) Lab had three papers that won awards in the past year, a testament to the hard work and perseverance of the researchers.

The first paper was from Tariq Abughofa and Ahmed Harby, who won the 2021 IEEE Big Data Service Conference’s Best Paper Award for their paper “Incremental Community Detection in Distributed Dynamic Graph”. This publication outlines Tariq’s research about a new algorithm for efficiently updating a graph data structure with new incoming streaming data to detect strongly connected community of nodes. The technique is applicable to any connected or linked data such as social media networks, Internet of Things or connected devices, and data storage systems. The research was funded by GnowIt and SOSCIP (Smart Computing for Innovation).

The second paper was written by Jason Lam and Yuhao Chen, who won the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining and Learning in the Legal Domain (MLLD) 2021 best paper award for their work on “Detection of Similar Legal Cases on Personal Injury”. Their paper uses natural language processing and deep learning models to analyze unstructured text data from legal case descriptions, allowing for easier search for similar legal cases, an important aspect of Canada’s case law system. The paper specifically looks at cases involving personal injury and concludes that semantic similarity detection is not enough for legal case data, and artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical in finding case similarity using legal criteria. The research was funded by NSERC, NFRF and was performed in collaboration with Queen’s Law.

The third paper was written by Isaac Hogan, Donghao Qiao, Ruikang Luo, Mojtaba Moattari and Austin Carthy, who won the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI 2021) best student paper award for their work on “FireWarn: Fire Hazards Detection Using Deep Learning Models”. Their paper posits that video cameras can be effectively used in surveillance systems to detect hazardous situations with the help of deep-learning techniques. The model created by the researchers achieved a 97% testing accuracy in labelling regions of interest in videos that show images of smoke and fire. This work was performed by the group of graduate and undergraduate researchers in collaboration with DRDC (Defense Research and Development Canada) and Royal Military College. These are just a few examples of the amazing work that happens every day here at the School of Computing. Congratulations to the students who won!