Tag: technology > Queen's School of Computing

Apaylo CCO Thanks QSC Student for Writing a Script That Improved The Company’s Operations

Robert Leaker is the Chief Compliance Officer of Apaylo Finance Technology Inc, a Canadian electronic payment service provider. Earlier this summer Robert reached out to Queen’s School of Computing to share what he referred to as an “amazing experience” working with a QSC student.

Adam Clarke was in his second year studying computer science when he got hired by Apaylo Finance Technology Inc for a short contract. At the time Adam was hired, Apaylo was using the Zoho mailing platform to send out ledgers of accounts to over 100 merchants daily. Due to the volume of merchants, the task of sending a separate ledger to each individual recipient was taking the team about two, two-and-a-half hours of extra work. Robert Leaker was looking to automate this task and asked Adam if he could help.

Adam took on that task and was able to come up with the required script. In order to do that he had to learn the Zoho programming language called Deluge. Robert Leaker said, “I was pretty impressed when Adam, who had never been exposed to this programming language, figured it out and came up with a script, and then did a YouTube video to show me and my team how to use it. We were able to operationalize Adam’s script and it now saves one person’s entire afternoon of work. Our company does 4 billion a year in transactions, but we only have about 12 staff. So the fact that we can free up somebody’s afternoon goes a long way in helping us focus on value added work and on business development.”

This is not Adam’s first experience with billing systems. Over the summer of 2022, Adam participated in the Build2Scale program ran by the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre. Build2Scale is a part-time accelerator program for entrepreneurs looking to innovate in the health sector. As part of the program, Adam co-founded and developed Verus Billing, an automated medical billing system that takes physician input and instantly generates billing codes. The company’s aim is to help physicians spend less time on billing, see more patients and earn more money.

Robert concluded our call by saying he would be happy to recommend Adam to any future employer.

“Adam is a very genuine human being,” he said. “I hope that that is representative of the kind of students that you’re turning out. He understood the problem and took it upon himself to find the solution for it. And that’s exactly what we needed.”

Queen’s Reliable Software Technology Lab Scores a Big Funding Win

The Queen’s Reliable Software Technology (QRST) Lab has just received a funding boost from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

The funding will be used on a project titled “A Security Analytics Framework for Attack Detection and Prevention in Smart Aging Care Systems”.

The project provides a much-needed analysis on how smart home systems can be used securely in elder care facilities, such as nursing homes. The function and expenditure of aging care systems can be drastically improved by smart home software and hardware, but these systems can be particularly vulnerable to attacks. As with most computer vulnerabilities, this issue is most easily addressed before it happens, in the form of detection and prevention systems.

The funded research from the QRST Lab seeks to create such a system, using advanced vulnerability assessment, machine learning and monitoring techniques to detect and prevent common and unknown threats.

This project provides the backbone for smart systems to be used in a meaningful way in health care systems.

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!

Reimagining Interactivity – Queen’s School of Computing’s iStudio Undergoes Renovations

“Unique components and technologies that unleash students’ creativity; exploring new ways of doing things”
Dr. Sara Nabil, director of the iStudio, on the lab’s purpose

The School of Computing has received a much-needed upgrade to one of its labs – the iStudio design lab.

Headed by Dr. Sara Nabil, iStudio is a state-of-the-art digital fabrication studio focusing on interactivity between people and the objects that occupy their spaces. Bridging the gap between material science and computing, the team at iStudio studies technologies in a wide variety of areas – ranging from furniture to architecture. At the core, the team at iStudio looks for new ways of embedding electronics into things, ranging from everyday items to furniture to entire walls. This involves rigorous research – Dr. Nabil and her team have had to invent new fabrication techniques to even attempt their ambitious projects.

The upgrade has added a slew of new, high-tech equipment to allow for advanced manufacturing processes and to explore new ways to integrate technology into physical objects. For example, the lab has two digital sewing machines, a rotating 3D-scanner, and two brand new 3D printers that allows them to print a variety of mediums, including resin and PLA filament (Polylactic Acid, a type of renewable thermoplastic). These printers also function on an axis, allowing them to print from top-bottom, instead of just from bottom-to-top.

Another important process being researched by the lab is the integration of technology into fabrics in what is known as e-textiles to create interactive furnishing and wearables, such as clothing and accessories. For example, the Talking Toque is a winter hat with embedded speakers sewn in between the layers of fabric, designed to allow for music listening without headphones getting in the way of warm ears.

The Talking Toque lets wearers keep their ears warm while listening to music.

Another exciting project focuses on the potential for interactive furniture and decorative objects. This explores how people interact with the things in their homes, and how these objects can physically change in response to these interactions. Morvaz, for example, is a shape-changing vase that shifts based on how it is touched.

The Morvaz reacts to touch, changing shape as a reaction to stimuli.

Objects can also react to other stimuli. TacTiles are a set of colour-changing tiles that go from a light-blue pattern to a dark blue in response to heat, making them able to display the warmth of a space in a uniquely visual way.

TacTiles are temperature-sensitive, shifting colours based on heat.

As with most of the designs from the iStudio, these projects were developed in tandem with outside users, people with problems that need solving or big ideas that they want to see realized. The goal of the lab is to create things for everyone to interact with, making consulting with many different people a crucial part of the development process. Much of the lab’s focus is on developing these technologies, then allowing end users to explore their own implementation solutions. Dr. Nabil sees a future when interactive technology can be provided as flat-pack kits with instructions on how to integrate things like the wearable speakers or the shape-changing furniture into objects already present in homes using simple tools.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to use the newly renovated iStudio to its fullest potential, Dr. Nabil hopes that soon the lab will be back in full swing.