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Month: November 2011

Open House Friday, Dec. 9, 10AM-2PM

QSC Open House - Dec 9 10-2

That’s right, save the date and make plans to attend Queen’s School of Computing’s Open House! Friday, December 9, from 10am – 2pm the School will open its doors to local and area high school students, their teachers, Queen’s students, faculty & staff and the Kingston community.

The day will be packed with information, hands-on demos and lab tours. This will be a terrific opportunity for everyone to see first-hand the exciting and ground-breaking research that is happening right here at Queen’s School of Computing, every day.

Open House Events at Goodwin Hall, 25 Union Street:

•    6th floor lobby: Reception

Join us in the lobby to begin your tour.  Meet with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff from Queen’s School of Computing

•    521: Exer-Gaming with EQUIS Lab (Dr. Nick Graham)

Experience exer-gaming with demos from Dr. Nick Graham’s EQUIS Lab

•    524: Conference Room (11, noon, 1pm)

Dr. Bob Tennant, Dr. Kai Salomaa, and Debby Robertson will provide an overview of our undergraduate and graduate programs and answer any questions you may have about joining the School of Computing.

Michelle Lee will discuss our innovative internship program,  experience co-op Queen’s style, Andrea Macintyre will answer any admissions questions.

•    248: Queen’s Game Developers Club, Scott Grant

This is your chance to tour our undergraduate computing labs as well as hear from Scott Grant, PhD Candidate, instructor, and President of the Queen’s Game Developers Club.

•    624: Incremental Test Case Generation for UML-RT Models, Eric Rapos (Dr. James Cordy)

Model driven development (MDD) is on the rise in software engineering and no more so than in the realm of real-time systems.  We are developing prototypes to incrementally generate test cases, as opposed to regenerating a test suite every time a model is changed.  This will result in an improved understanding of the impact of typical state machine evolution steps on test cases, and how this impact can be mitigated by reusing previously generated test cases.

•    627: Telecommunications Research Lab (Dr. Hossam Hassanein)

  • Ed Koush, Wireless Sensors for Harsh Industrial Environments
  • Ahmed Hasswa, SocioSpaces – Make Every Place Your Space

•    631: Database Systems Lab, Wendy Powley (Dr. Pat Martin)

The Database Systems Laboratory is involved in a variety of areas including Autonomic Computing, Workload Control Techniques for Database Management Systems, Cloud Computing, and Policy-based Management for complex systems such as Web Services and Database Management Systems.

•    7th floor lobby: Parallax, Jesse Burstyn (Dr. Roel Vertegaal)

Parallax is an interdimensional platforming and puzzle-solving game. The goal in each level is to reach the exit by travelling between two overlapping dimensions through rifts. Interactive objects in the level include boost pads and switches that rotate the rifts. Parallax challenges the player to think beyond the spatial boundaries of traditional platformers.
Parallax began as a project for the graduate course CISC 877 – Engineering Digital Games. Our goal was to develop a technology to allow seamless graphical rendering and physical movement through dimensional ‘rifts’.

•    7th floor lobby: TactileTape, David Holman (Dr. Roel Vertegaal)

TactileTape is a one-dimensional touch sensor that looks and behaves like  regular  tape. It can be constructed from everyday materials (a pencil, tin foil, and shelf liner) and senses single-touch input on curved and deformable surfaces.  It is low-cost, easy to interface, and is ideally suited to rapid exploration of interfaces in early design stages.  It  is  used as  a roll of  touch sensitive  material from which designers cut pieces to  quickly add touch sensitive strips to physical prototypes.

•    Biomedical Computing Demos (Dr. Gabor Ficthinger, Dr. Parvin Mousavi)

  • 6th floor lobby: PerkStation Demo, Thomas Chen, Irene Ayukawa, Mattea Welch
  • 757: Tracked Ultrasound Demo Site, Csaba Pinter
  • 757: Perk Tutor Demo, Laura Bartha and Simrin Nagpal
  • 757: Visual Programming for Back Pain Management, Melissa Trezise
  • 757: Prostate Cancer Detection, Farhad Imani

•    724: Geoff Seaborn (Dr. Selim Akl)

At the Queen’s Arrhythmia Research Centre, physicians, scientists, and students are performing promising research studies in order to provide better outcomes for patients with heart disease, and to reduce the tremendous burden heart disease places on healthcare resources. Through these collaborations of expert physicians at the Kingston General Hospital and the Hotel Dieu Hospital with Queen’s students from diverse disciplines, research results are directly translated into improved healthcare.

•    728: Dr. David Skillicorn Reverse Engineering from Language, Smart Information Management Lab

Documents and speeches provide a lot of information other than what they are (apparently) about: what the authors’ mental state was; whether they’re being deceptive; what their attitude is to the things they write about; and even their health. In the Smart Information Management Lab we study the relationship between these properties and the structure of the language that results. 

The focus at present is finding ways to go beyond the “bag of words” approach to find deeper structures in language that we can use to reverse engineer the relationship between what we say and write, and what’s going on inside our brains.

•    736: Andrew Dickinson (Dr. Randy Ellis)

Fusing computer-assisted techniques with surgery comes with numerous benefits, such as a significant increase in outcome success. With collaborators at Kingston General Hospital, these types of techniques have been integrated to aid in total hip replacement and hip resurfacing procedures – surgeries that a small deviation in angle or placement of a prosthetic can lead to premature failure. Come and test your “surgeon hands” on our virtual surgery model and see the future of surgery for yourself.

•    156 Barrie: SAIL Lab Demos (Dr. Ahmed Hassan)

  • Identifying Performance Deviations, Mark D. Syer As large-scale software systems like World of Warcraft and the Blackberry Infrastructure need to handle increasingly more users and content, identifying performance problems has become a major priority. However, the amount of test data is too much to handle by humans, especially in the short period of time allocated for testing. We will demo a successful approach to automatically identify performance problems based on the dissimilarity of resource usage metrics.
  • Effective Bug Localization, Stephen W. ThomasModern software developers are faced with hundreds of incoming bug reports each day. For each bug report, a developer must manually determine which source code file(s) to change in order to fix the bug, which is time consuming, tedious, and error prone. We will demo an effective semi-automated method for determining which file(s) need to be changed to fix a given bug. Our method uses information retrieval (IR) models to compute the textual similarity between a bug report’s description and the source code files in question.
  • Mobile App Development, Israel Mojica and Weiyi ShangThe software engineering world recently has been revolutionized by the advent of mobile platforms like the iPhone/Android/Blackberry smartphones and iPad/PlayBook tablets. Mobile app development brings various unique challenges, such as scaling down features, incorporating touch screen gestures and dealing with battery consumption. To prepare students for these challenges, the SAIL lab organizes a course on Engineering of Mobile Ultra Large Scale Systems (CISC 835). Our students will demo the mobile apps they are developing for their course projects on the Android and PlayBook platforms.

Come back to this site and visit our Facebook Page for further updates on the day’s planned events!

We’re looking forward to welcoming you to Queen’s School of Computing!

Hottest major on campus? Computer science

According to NetworkWorld:

NetworkWorld
Hottest major on campus? Computer science

The nation’s best undergraduate computer science programs are bracing for a record number of applications this fall, as more high school seniors are lured by plentiful jobs, six-figure starting salaries and a hipster image fostered by the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

Early admissions are piling up at elite tech schools, including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvey Mudd College and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – all of whose undergraduate computer science and engineering programs are rated tops by U.S. News & World Report, the de facto college ranking in the United States.

“It’s pretty clear that computer science is on the rise again,” says Mark Stehlik, assistant dean for undergraduate education at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. “Most of the U.S. economy is stagnant, but computer science grads are getting hired and at pretty good salaries. People also see the applications of technology, and they see that it’s pretty cool. Computing is much more powerful and much more pervasive than it was 10 years ago.”

TRL Wins Best Paper Award

Congratulations to our colleagues in the QSC Telecommunications Research Laboratory:
Fadi M. Al-Turjman, Hossam S. Hassanein, and Sharief M.A. Oteafy, who had their paper “Towards Augmenting Federated Wireless Sensor Networks” selected as Best Paper at the Second International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2011).

 

 

 

 

Save the Date: Queen’s School of Computing Open House – Friday, December 9, 2011

That’s right, save the date and make plans to attend Queen’s School of Computing’s Open House! Friday, December 9, from 10am – 2pm the School will open its doors to local and area high school students, their teachers, Queen’s students, faculty & staff and the Kingston community.

The day will be packed with information, hands-on demos and lab tours. This will be a terrific opportunity for everyone to see first-hand the exciting and ground-breaking research that is happening right here at Queen’s School of Computing, every day.

Come back to this site and visit our Facebook Page for further updates on the day’s planned events!

Our Open House is being presented as part of Computer Science Education Week. For more information on CSEd Week, visit their website.

We’re looking forward to welcoming you to Queen’s School of Computing!

Queen’s School of Computing Wins Silver at ACE

The 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) was held in Lisbon, Portugal, November 8 – 11, 2011. Queen’s School of Computing graduate student Jason Kurczak won a Best Paper Silver Award at the conference for his paper:

Hearing is Believing: Evaluating Ambient Audio for Location-Based Games
Jason Kurczak, T.C. Nicholas Graham, Claire Joly and Regan L. Mandryk.

Jason conducts his M.Sc. research in the EQUIS lab under the supervision of  Dr. Nick Graham.
For more details, please visit the ACE 2011 website.

School of Computing Faculty Member, Mary McCollam, Fights Food Waste

Every year in Kingston thousands of pounds of surplus food end up in the garbage. Mary McCollam feels strongly about food security and sustainability, so she volunteers with Loving Spoonful, a volunteer-driven organization that diverts some of those perishable items to local meal programs, shelters and other agencies. Ms McCollam’s involvement with Loving Spoonful has grown since 2008 and she currently serves as the chair of the board of directors.

“I wanted to make a contribution in a small way to important issues such as food security and sustainability. Loving Spoonful’s food reclamation program matched my interests because it enhances healthy food access for low income families while combating food waste and its adverse environmental effects,” says Ms McCollam, an adjunct associate professor in the School of Computing.

Ms McCollam and other volunteers collect surplus perishable food from restaurants, caterers, cafeterias, farmers, wholesalers and market vendors. Loving Spoonful has delivered over 12,500 pounds of this perishable food to local organizations so far this year. Several Queen’s establishments, including the Lazy Scholar, Leonard Hall cafeteria and the Donald Gordon Conference Centre, donate unused perishable items to this worthwhile initiative.

Queen’s students have volunteered to support many of the organization’s different programs. As well, Loving Spoonful hired a Queen’s Work Study student last summer to help with its Grow a Row program, which delivered over 7,000 pounds of locally grown produce to agencies this year. Grants from the United Way in 2010 and 2011 assisted with this and other programs.

The United Way serving Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington (KFLA) has helped Loving Spoonful build capacity and work toward becoming a United Way agency. The directors attend board development sessions and workshops hosted by the United Way.

Queen’s faculty, staff, students and retirees are one of the biggest contributors to the United Way serving KFLA. Queen’s has raised $277,000 of its $320,000 goal to date. Pledge cards can be returned to the Human Resources department (Fleming Hall, Stewart-Pollock Wing) or sent through campus mail.

Visit the Loving Spoonful website to learn more about its programs.

School of Computing faculty member Mary McCollam volunteers with Loving Spoonful, a volunteer-driven organization that diverts perishable items to local meal programs, shelters and other agencies.

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