Month: March 2010

Please feel free to drop in on the High School Programming Contest being hosted by the School of Computing on Tuesday, 30 March in Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 202, from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm. Teams of up to four students each from five of the area’s high schools will attempt to solve four challenging programming problems in three hours. (That’s a lot of numbers in one sentence, I realize.) The event has been organized with the cooperation of the Limestone District School Board and the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, and as part of the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s annual Computer Programming Contests series.

Richard

Please join me in congratulating Emad Shihab who has been awarded a top Canadian NSERC (CGS)

Emad was awarded the NSERC PGS D last September and they just upgraded him to the NSERC CGS D.

Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS) and NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships (PGS) provide financial support to high-calibre scholars who are engaged in a master’s or doctoral program in the natural sciences or engineering. The CGS will be offered to the top-ranked applicants at each level (master’s and doctoral) and the next tier of meritorious applicants will be offered an NSERC PGS. This support allows these scholars to fully concentrate on their studies and seek out the best research mentors in their chosen fields.

On behalf of the School, I would like to offer special thanks to our five colleagues

Roger Browse
Jim Cordy
Randy Ellis
Bob Tennent
Roel Vertegaal

for their enthusiastic participation in this important event, and to Irene for organizing the proceedings.

Selim

Dear all,

I am happy to announce that Roel Vertegaal’s Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence (ORF – RE) Project:  “User Interface Technologies for Non Planar & Flexible Displays”  was approved for funding. Please see the following for details.

Congratulations Roel!

Selim

A sincere thank you to the following people who gave generously of their time in order to make the School of Computing March Break Open House a big hit with our visitors:

• Tamas Ungi
• Doug Wightman
• Tad Stach
• Eric Rapos
• Eril Berkok
• Anson Herriotts
• Wissam Zaghal
• Charlotte Blinston
• Daniel Basilio
• Mike Ounsworth
• Lynda Moulton
• Wendy Bertrim
• Bob Tennent
• Irene LaFleche
• Nick Graham
• Cheryl Savery
• Jason Kurczak
• Chris Wolfe
• Joey Pape

Cheers,
Selim

A robot developed in part by Computing professor Gabor Fichtinger is the subject of a podcast that has been nominated for a prestigious National Magazine Award.

The robot is set to revolutionize prostate cancer screening.

For more information, see the Queen’s Gazette article.

The podcast is available here.

Dear all,

It is my pleasure to announce that our cross-appointed colleague from Medicine, Dr. Damian Redfearn, has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor effective July 1st, 2010. Congratulations Damian on a well-deserved promotion and very best wishes for continued success.

Regards,
Selim

Posted By MIKE NORRIS, THE WHIG-STANDARD

Gabor Fichtinger refers to it as a “gizmo.”

If you’re a man past the age of 40, this gizmo may save your life.

Fichtinger, a professor in Queen’s University’s School of Computing, and some American researchers are garnering recognition for their development of a magnetic resonance imaging-based robot that can detect and treat prostate cancer.

“It’s like a guided missile,” said Fichtinger, who has taught courses in computer-assisted surgery at Queen’s since 2007.

For the full story, please see here.

Dear all,

It is my pleasure to inform you that the School of Computing contributed to a podcast that has been nominated for this year’s National Magazine Awards for Digital Media.

The IEEE Spectrum show entitled “Robots for Real” is a finalist in this year’s National Magazine Awards for Digital Media, category Podcasting.

Gabor Fichtinger contributed a segment to the “Surgeons and Robots Scrub Up” piece on the Perk Lab’s “MR-guided prostate biopsy robot”, a collaborative project with the Johns Hopkins University.

If you’re not familiar with the National Magazine Awards, think of it as the Oscars of the magazine industry. Just being a finalist is a big accomplishment – the other finalists in this category this year are Business Review; The New Yorker;
Tablet; and Vanity Fair. This prestigious nomination is a tribute to everyone who helped write, edit, record, produce the show, as well as to all the researchers who contributed the enormous wealth of science summed up in these few short minutes. The link to the entire show is at:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/special-report-robots-for-real.

To see our piece, click on “Surgeons and Robots Scrub Up”.

Selim

The Ministry Of Research An Innovations has announced the successful Ontario Research Fund-Research Excellence program grants. Under this program the “Ontario Consortium for Adaptive Interventions in Radiation Oncology” (PI Dr. David Jaffray, UHN, Toronto) was funded at $7,000,000. Gabor Fichtinger will co-lead with Dr. Terry Peters (UWO) one of the four themes of the Consortium on “Open Source Software Platforms and Databases for the Adaptive Process”.

Read the official announcement.