Month: December 2010

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