Department of Computer Science

Lucian Ilie NSERC recently awarded 2 prestigious honors to CSD faculty members. Kaizhong Zhang was awarded a Discovery Accelerator Grant and Lucian Ilie was awarded a Research Tools and Instruments Grant. Congratulations to both on their exceptional work.

Stephen Watt gave a talk in the "Science Here and Now:" series at the Wolf Performance Hall on April 16th entitled "The Limits of Computation". The talk explored what computers might ultimately do, now and in the future, and what will be forever beyond their reach. (more)

CS grad Ben Shirley has co-authored, along with Peter Rogan and John Mucaki from Biochemistry, an article published in the on-line journal Human Mutation. The article is entitled "Prediction of Mutant mRNA Splice Isoforms by Information Theory-Based Exon Definition". (more)

CS grad Maia Hoeberechts is a Western Alumna being featured in the latest Young Alumni magazine published by the university. The article focuses on Maia's work with NEPTUNE Canada's deep-water research off the coast of Vancouver Island. (more)

On Monday, December 10, 2012, Bahlul Haider successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "A New Algorithm For De Novo Genome Assembly" and his supervisors were Dr. Lucian Ilie and Dr Roberto Solis Oba. (more)

Two teams from the Computer Science department represented Western at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Windsor, Saturday, November 3. Their splendid performances at the event was due to good solid preperation. Congratulations to all! (more)

Weiming Li recently won the best student paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM2012). Weiming's supervisors are Western's Kaizhong Zhang and Bin Ma from the University of Waterloo. (more)

Ben Shirley, John Mucacki (Biochem), and Peter Rogan (CS, Biochem) have released software for genome-scale mutation analysis, which will be marketed by CLC Bio for Cytognomix (London, ON). The splicing mutation pipeline plug-in finds and interprets genomic variants that alter mRNA splicing in human exome, targeted sequencing, or complete genome data. (more)

Charles Ling chaired the panel titled "Mining the Big Data" at the ACM KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) Conference in Beijing, China. ACM KDD is the top annual international conference for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. (more)

Congratulations to Bob Mercer who received a Distinguished Service Award from CAIAC and became a CAIAC Fellow at the recent AI/GI/CRV conference. During Bob's time at CSCSI/SCEIO and now CAIAC he has played a key role in the development of the AI fabric of teachers and researchers in Canada. (more)

Congratulations to Peter Rogan on being approved for funding by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation as principal investigator for the research study entitled "Detection of Mutations in Gene Variants of Uncertain Significance in Inherited Breast and Ovarian Cancer". This bioinformatics project uses information theory for disease diagnosis and is worth $450,000 over 3 years.

Starting in September 2012, the Department of Computer Science is introducing a new course, CS2214A/B entitled Discrete Structures for Computing. This course is designed to replace the need for other discrete structures courses in our programs, namely Mathematics 2155A/B and 2156A/B. (more)

Prof. Stephen Watt has made pioneering contributions in the fields of symbolic and algebraic computing. His achievements range from the development of the mathematical programming language called Aldor to being one of the prime architects of MathML. He is this year’s recipient of the J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation from the University of Waterloo. Stephen will be giving a talk at the ceremony on Thursday, June 14, 2012. (more)

Congratulations to Jacquelyne Forgette on being awarded a Faculty of Science Graduate Student Teaching Award. The Faculty of Science views high quality teaching as the most important part of its mandate in mounting high quality undergraduate programs. Great job!

On Thursday, April 26th, Jenna Butler placed second (out of more than 100 entrants) in the Three Minute Thesis competition where competitors must explain their research to a general audience... in 3 minutes. Congratulations, Jenna! (more) (watch video)

IBM Canada is contributing a landmark $65 million of computers and software to Western University, which will exponentially enhance the collaborative efforts already underway between the two partners, as part of a recently announced $210 million research and development innovation network. (more) (watch video)

Olga Veksler was awarded an accelerator grant from NSERC as a result of her Discovery grant application. The Discovery Accelerator Supplements (DAS) Program provides substantial and timely additional resources to accelerate progress and maximize the impact of superior research programs. Olga will be using the grant for post-doc funding. (more)

Dr. Gwadry-Sridhar was invited to present the informatics research and software development her team is working on at Arab Health 2012 in Dubai in Jan. 2012. The work was profiled as part of the Canada Pavillion and the Ontario Government. (more)

Rosy Zhao's entry for a CS1033 poster design assignment was chosen from a total of 500 posters by FOCA for their Friends Of Captive Animals campaign to boycott circuses that use animals. Western's Community Service Learning Department co-ordinated the contest. (more)

Jenna Butler is one of the winners of the Great Ideas for Teaching Competition, and will be presenting "Acting Out Algorithms – A “Hands-on” Approach to Teaching Computer Science" as part of the Winter Conference on Teaching. (more)

Hamed Saadat, a third-year computer science student at The University of Western Ontario, has developed Santa’s Delivery, a holiday-themed game available through the App Store on iOS Apple devices. Proceeds go to help the people of Afghanistan. (more)

Yan Luo, David DeAngelis and Charles Ling were awarded First Prize for Best Clinical Research Presentation for their GlucoGuide tablet app poster at the 2nd Annual Diabetes Research Day, held on November 15, 2011 at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry (more)

Eric Schost was awarded one of 3 Young Computer Science Reseacher Awards for 2010 by the Canadian Association of Computer Science. Eric is recognized as a gifted interdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of mathematics and computer science. He was also the General Chair at this year's Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation. (more)

Western recently participated in the 2011 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The Mustangs team was comprised of Michael Friesen, Ivana Vilimonovic and Coby Viner and the Disciples team was Nathaniel Bryans, Ben Dunkin and Ruth Wong. The teams were coached by Vadim Mazalov and Stephen Watt. Congratulations to all! (more)

The CSD Outreach committee recently participated in the London Biotech Week BIOlympic competitions. The participating grade 7 and 8 students thoroughly enjoyed competing at the station manned by our Outreach committee members. (more)

Bruce Richards recently received the Faculty of Science Outreach Award for the 2010/2011 school year at the annual Science Faculty and Staff Appreciation Luncheon. His outstanding dedication to computer science outreach is greatly appreciated by Western's Computer Science Department. (more)

On Thursday, September 15, 2011, Andrew Delong successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Advances in Graph Cut Optimization: Multi-Surface Models, Label Costs, and Hierarchical Costs" and his supervisor was Dr. Yuri Boykov. (more)

On Friday, September 9, 2011, Jun Du successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Active Learning with Generalized Queries" and his supervisor was Dr. Charles Ling. (more)

Bo Cui Bo Cui successfully defended his PhD thesis titled, "Some Single and Combined Operations on Formal Languages: Algebraic Properties and Complexity", on Thursday, August 18. His doctoral work was supervised by Dr. Lila Kari.

Sheng Yu was an invited speaker at DLT 2011 (15th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory), which was held this summer in Italy. The topic of his talk was "State complexity research and approximation" and was co-authored with Yuan Gao. (more)

Lila Kari recently participated in a one hour panel discussion with Benny Gil of the Weizmann Institute of Science and a host on China Radio International. The topic of the discussion was DNA Computers. (more)

Congratulations to Jeff Hsien-Chi Wu for winning the 2010/2011 Graduate Student Teaching Award for his work in leading students through the Computer Science 1033 labs. This is the second time Jeff has won a SOGS Teaching Award. He was previously awarded this honor in 2008/2009. (more)

Western has released version 2.0 of it's iWestern app with the help of students from the Department of Computer Science. The new version is an update for the existing iPhone app but also includes new apps for the Blackberry and Android platforms. Congratulations to all those involved. (more)

Thank You The Computer Science Department would like to thank all its graduate students, undergraduate students and alumni volunteers who participated in Outreach Activities during the 2010/2011 school year. Some of our wonderful student/alumni volunteers are:

Nathan Bryans, Jenna Butler, Mike Burrell, Andrew Chan, Claudette Critchley, Stephanie Dorman, Ryan Ferguson, Rachel Grimard, Erin Guillemette, Rami Khalil, Wahab Khan, Beth Locke, Jeff Shantz, Jonathan Tieu, Jacqueline Van Dommelen and Jordan Van Dyk

Thanks so much for all your help! We are very fortunate at Western to have such a fantastic student body!

On Friday, March 25, 2011, Syed Shariyar Murtaza successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Finding Faulty Functions From The Traces of Field Failures" and his supervisors were Dr. Nazim Madhavji and Dr. Mechelle Gittens. (more)

Jamie Andrews was recently awarded an NSERC "Engage" grant to help fund graduate student Santo Carino's software testing research at Research In Motion (RIM). Santo previously worked at RIM under the UWO Internship program. Congratulations to all involved. (more)

USC The University Student Council's 2009-2010 Teaching Honour Roll includes the following Computer Science instructors: Mark Bramwell, Mark Daley and Hanan Lutfiyya. Congratulations to all on a job well done!

On Thursday, December 16, 2010, Yuan Gao successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Advanced Topics on State Complexity of Combined Operations" and his supervisor was Dr. Sheng Yu. (more)

On Friday, October 29, 2010, Zude Li successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Characterizing and Diagnosing Architectural Degeneration of Software Systems from Defect Perspective" and his supervisors were Dr. Nazim Madhavji & Dr. Mechelle Gittens. (more)

Congratulations to Steven Beauchemin, whose RoadLAB Initiative was chosen among 420 applications from researchers, automotive companies, and innovators, from 25 different countries to win the 2010 Innovation Award, from The Network of Automotive Excellence (NoAE). (more)

Congratulations to Mike Katchabaw, who received a Western Innovation Fund Award for the Algorithmic Music Evolution Engine (AMEE) project which is a software system capable of dynamically composing and emotionally adapting music in real-time. (more)

On Monday, August 9, 2010, Shinnosuke Seki successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "DNA Watson - Crick Complementarity in Computer Science" and his supervisor was Dr. Lila Kari. (more)

Congratulations to Jeff Shantz on being awarded a Faculty of Science Graduate Student Teaching Award. The Faculty of Science views high quality teaching as the most important part of its mandate in mounting high quality undergraduate programs.

The department wishes to congratulate Marc Moreno Maza on being awarded one of only two MITACS Mentorship Awards. Marc was nominated for this award by his graduate and post-graduate students. (more) (more)

The Society of Graduate Students honoured its top teaching assistants recently. The Department of Computer Science tied for the most recipients with 3 students receiving awards. Congratulations to Jeff (Hsien Chi) Wu, Jeff Shantz, and Jenna Cameron. Well done!!

Steven Beauchemin, Mike Bauer and a team of graduate students have partnered with Laval University researchers Denis Laurendeau, an electrical and computer engineering professor, and Normand Teasdale, a medical school professor, on the Road Lab advanced driving assistance system. (more) (more)

Thank You The Computer Science Department would like to thank all its graduate students, undergraduate students and alumni volunteers who participated in Outreach Activities during the 2009/2010 school year. Some of our wonderful student/alumni volunteers are:

Nathan Bryans, Mike Burrell, Jenna Cameron, Andrew Chan, Claudette Critchley, Ryan Ferguson, Maia Hoeberechts, Rami Khalil, Wahab Khan, Beth Locke, John Moore and Nicole Park.

Thanks so much for all your help! We are very fortunate at Western to have such a fantastic student body!

The Department of Computer Science congratulates Jenna Cameron on being selected as a 2009 Google Canada Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship award winner. Jenna received $5000 and a trip to Arizona to attend the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. (more)

Congratulations to Eric Schost who has been awarded one of three inaugural Canadian Association for Computer Science Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher prizes. These prizes are sponsored by the CACS/AIC and recognize young computer science faculty members at Canadian universities within 10 years of their Ph.D. who have made highly significant contributions in their careers, particularly to research. (more)

The department wishes to congratulate John Barron on being awarded a Grant from the CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund. Dr. Barron and 3 other professors from UWO and Guelph share the grant titled "Development of a Quantitative Laser Image Platform for Plant Canopies". (more)

Nazim Madhavji has been mentioned as a strong influence in software engineering research in the Canadian Encyclopedia. The article erroneously places Dr. Madhavji at McGill University. This should be corrected soon. (more)

On Friday, January 29, 2010, Raphael Bahati successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Towards Adaptive Policy-Based Autonomic Management" and his supervisor was Dr. Michael Bauer. (more)

Steven Watt Congratulations to Stephen Watt who, in December of 2009, was ranked by the Microsoft Academic Search in the top 10 in the area of Scientific Computing. Professor Watt works in the areas of computer algebra, pen-based computing and compilers. We also congratulate other faculty members of Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra who together make up 9 of the top 100 in this field in December of 2009.

Drs. Michael Bauer (Computer Science) and Stewart McIntyre (Chemistry) have been awarded $1.2M by CANARIE to lead a multi-institutional project entitled "Active Network Interchange for Scientific Experimentation" (ANISE). The project will help researchers, in a wide range of disciplines, to fully exploit the massive amounts of data and research that flow along the CANARIE Network. (more)

James Miller and Remo Ferrari and Nazim H. Madhavji presented a paper entitled "Characteristics of New Requirements in the Presence or Absence of an Existing System Architecture" at the 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference which was selected as one of the best papers at the conference. (more)

On Wednesday, September 9, 2009, Abdelnasser Ouda successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Towards Automating Policy Based Management Systems" and his supervisors were Dr. Michael Bauer & Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya. (more)

On Tuesday, August 18, 2009, Qinghui Liu successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Web Latency Reduction with Prefetching" and his supervisor was Dr. Roberto Solis-Oba. (more)

Charles Ling was an invited speaker at the 2009 International Colloquium on Data Sciences, Knowledge Discovery and Business Intelligence, held in Sydney Australia. The title of his talk was: "Data Imbalance: When it Becomes a Pain and How to Ease It". (more)

The Department of Computer Science is honored to welcome distinguished speaker Professor Oscar H. Ibarra to this Friday's Colloquium. Professor Ibarra is from the University of California in Santa Barbara and will speak on "Membrane Computing and Spiking Neural Systems". (more)

Congratulations to Yong Zhang who received a student award for excellence for his presentation at the recent Twelfth International Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST (Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere) Radar. The title of his talk was "Refinement of 3D Doppler Velocity Using 3D Windprofiler Data". The paper was co-authored by John Barron and Bob Mercer.

Congratulations to Mike Burrell on being awarded a Faculty of Science Graduate Teaching Award. This is the second year in a row that Mike has won a student teaching Award. Last year he was awarded a SOGS Teaching Award. Well done!

Congratulations to Jeff Hsien-Chi Wu for winning the 2008/2009 Graduate Student Teaching Award for his work in leading students through the Computer Science 1033 labs. His students nominated him for this award. Not only does he get some well earned recognition for his hard work, but he also receives a $500 award. (more)

Thank You!! The Computer Science Department would like to thank all its graduate and undergraduate student volunteers who participated in Outreach Activities during the 2008/2009 school year:

Lucio Barreto, Nathan Bryans, Mike Burrell, Jenna Cameron, Andrew Chan, Andrew Delong, Ryan Ferguson, Rachel Grimard, Erin Guillemette, Maia Hoeberechts, Adam Kerr, Wahab Khan, Zude Li, Omid Mola, Nicole Park, Grace Sham, Jeff Shantz, Derek Vince and Nick Yang.

We are very fortunate at Western to have such a fantastic student body!

The Department of Computer Science congratulates Jenna Cameran and Beth Locke for being selected as finalists for the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. (more)

The Department of Computer Science congratulates Lucian Ilie for being recognized as one of Western's Faculty Scholars. The award was established to "honour and celebrate outstanding scholarly achievements at a critical point in the career of a faculty member at Western. This award will recognize outstanding contributions in research, teaching or service reflecting sustained excellence in all scholarly activities." Lucian Ilie's selection is based on his outstanding research achievements and excellent teaching.

Students are invited to participate in UWORCS, the departmental conference on research in computer science. To attend or to submit a talk, simply register online no later than April 9. The conference will take place April 16. (more)

Congratulations to Garrett Kapp on receiving a Laurene Paterson Estate Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded to a full-time undergraduate student who has demonstrated financial need and acheives a minimum 80% average. (more)

On Thursday, February 12, 2009, Hai-Ning Liang successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Interaction Design and Visual Cognitive Tools: Enabling Effective Human-Information Interaction" and his supervisor was Dr. Kamran Sedig. (more)

Dr. Steven Beauchemin was appointed by UWO's Provost Fred Longstaffe, to be part of the "Working Group On Information Security" (WGIS); a campus-wide initiative to develop and implement policies and tools to make our IT experience not only safer, but better. (more)

Lila Kari has initiated a new Biocomputing Student Award. This $500 award will be presented by the Biocomputing Laboratory to an eligible student who demonstrates research interest in biocomputing/biomolecular computing. (more)

On Monday, December 8, 2008, Jinhui Qin successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Job Co-Allocation Strategies in Multiple HPC Clusters" and her supervisor was Dr. Michael Bauer. (more)

Once again, the CS033 Multimedia & Communications class had their bi-annual poster contest. The purpose of this competition is to give students an opportunity to work on a "real - live" project - a poster to encourage students to vote in a Federal election. (more)

Congratulations to Lila Kari, who has co-authored an article with Grzegorz Rozenberg, entitled "The Many facets of Natural Computing", which is featured on the cover of the October issue of the Communications of the ACM. (more)

Congratulations to Andriy Miranskyy, who has co-authored a paper for CASCON 2008 which will receive the Best Student Paper Award when the conference is held in Toronto in late October. (more)

On Monday, August 18, 2008, Akbar Siami-Namin successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Mutation Analysis in Software Testing" and his supervisor was Dr. Jamie Andrews. (more)

Mark Perry was the Keynote Speaker at "The 2008 Workshop Web2Touch - living experience through web". This workshop was in conjunction with the 2008 IEEE 11th International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE 2008) held in São Paulo, Brazil. His talk was entitled "SaaS, the Web2 for business: can we put it in a Cloud?", and was sponsored by the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). (more)

James Miller and Remo Ferrari presented a paper entitled "Architectural Effects on Requirements Decisions: An Exploratory Study" at WICSA in February which was judged as one of the top 4 papers at the conference. (more)

Congratulations to Andrew Delong on being awarded a Faculty of Science Graduate Teaching Award. There was an informal presentation at the Grad Club to recognise the award recipients on June 6, 2008 at 3:30 pm.

The Awards Ceremony for the 2008 SOGS Graduate Student Teaching Award was held at the Great Hall on May 13th, 2008. Congratulations to Mike Burrell who was one of only 20 students to receive awards.

On Thursday, April 3, 2008, Yuan Xue successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Key Management Schemes for Distributed Sensor Networks" and her supervisor was Dr. Helmut Jürgensen. (more)

This year's Florence Bucke Science Prize, which celebrates excellence in research over the past 5 years, has been awarded to Yuri Boykov. Yuri gave a public talk entitled "Can Computers See?" in Conron Hall on March 31, 2008.

On Friday, December 14, 2007, Xiaofang (Maggie) Xie successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "On the Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Symbols" and her supervisor was Dr. Stephen Watt. (more)

Zachary Kincaid has been selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award 2008, sponsored by Microsoft Research. CONGRATULATIONS! (more)

On Tuesday, September 4, 2007, Yuzhen Xie successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Fast Algorithms, Modular Methods, Parallel Approaches and Software Engineering for Solving Polynomial Systems Symbolically" and her supervisors were Dr. Marc Moreno Maza & Dr. Stephen Watt. (more)

Congratulations to Brad Simmons and Angela McCloskey for winning a best paper award at the IEEE/IARIA International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems held in June in Athens Greece. (more)

On Wednesday, August 22, 2007, Jun Yan successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Machine Learning for Stock Selection" and his supervisor was Dr. Charles Ling. (more)

On Tuesday, August 7, 2007, Shengli Sheng successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Cost Sensitive Learning with Data Acquisition" and his supervisor was Dr. Charles Ling. (more)

Nazim Madhavji was recently thanked by the trustees of a public library in India for pointing out to the local government that the library was in need of english books and computers. In response to Nazim's letter, the Chief Minister of the state responded with an 18,000 Rupee fund for the library.

Phillip Moretti and Sylvia Osborn Individual academic awards were given out to three Computer Science students this year. The awards were handed out at the Annual Awards Ceremony at the Talbot College Theatre on June 14, 2007. (more)

After the exams have been written and the marks have been submitted, instructor Laura Reid of the Computer Science Department dives into activities which have won her the 2007 Faculty of Science Outreach and Recruitment Award. (more)

The Computer Science Outreach Committee has been very busy the last two months. The outreach group's mission is to promote computer science in general, and UWO's Computer Science Department specifically, to the public and high school students in London and surrounding communities. They will visit any area high school that opens its doors to them. (more).

On Tuesday, March 6th, Computer Science 033b, Multimedia and Communications, had its own version of American Idol titled "CS Designer Idol". Students were asked to design a poster for marketing Computer Science's "Bit By Bit Computer Camp". This is a summer day camp for kids ages 10-15. The advertising for the camp needed some life added to it and that's where the CS033 students came in. (more).

Mark Perry recently hosted two conferences at the UWO Faculty of Law. "Free/Libre and Open Source Software as Democratic Principle" was held on April 9th and "Digital Copyright in a User Generated World" was held on April 10th. Both conferences were co-sponsered by the Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Law and Western Law. (more).

Congratulations to Remo Ferrari and Nazim Madhavji for Best Paper awards they received together at recent Requirements Engineering and Software Architecture conferences. One award resulted in a third paper being published in a special Information and Software Technology journal. (more).

Congratulations to Shengli Sheng who won the Best Poster Award at the recent "UW and IEEE Kitchener-Waterloo Section Joint Workshop on Knowledge and Data Mining", which was held at the University of Waterloo. (more)

Dr. Charles Ling was invited to give a Keynote Speech in "The UW and IEEE Kitchener-Waterloo Section Joint Workshop on Knowledge and Data Mining", 30-31 October, 2006, University of Waterloo. For more info, see: pami.uwaterloo.ca/~cswkkong/KDM/

Congratulations to Hanan Lutfiyya on being selected as one of this years 12 Faculty Scholars. Recipients are recognized as having an international presence in their discipline and are considered all-round scholars. The Faculty Scholar title is retained for 2 years. (more)

On Monday, Aug. 28, 2006, Wael Hosny Fouad Aly successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Feedback Control for Data Centres that Support Differentiated Services" and his supervisor was Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya. (more)

Shiva Mohan was recently quoted in the on-line news magazine itWorldCanada talking about his involvement in IBM's Extreme Blue intern program. (more)

Mark Daley and Mike Katchabaw were recently featured on a Rogers Cable 13 news spot about the Department's new Game Design program. Also appearing was graduate student Andrew Delong. (more)

Eight individual academic awards were given out to seven seperate Computer Science students this year. The awards were handed out at the Annual Awards Ceremony at the Talbot College Theatre on June 15, 2006. (more)

Congratulations to Khalid Sherdil, who has been awarded a 2005-2006 Graduate Student Teaching Award. This graduate student teaching award is sponsored by the Society for Graduate Students, the Graduate Teaching Assistant Union, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Sixteen awards are administered yearly, and all graduate student teaching assistants are eligible. Award winners were selected from the approximately 1500 nominations submitted by undergraduate students.

Congratulations to Ali Hamou on his receiving a Faculty of Science Graduate Student Teaching Award. We take this opportunity to thank him for his valued and effective contribution to our undergraduate program. There will be an informal presentation at the Grad Club on June 7, 2006. Those attending, please rsvp to Ms. Pamela Brown by May 24, 2006 (pjbrown@uwo.ca or ext. 86151).

Mike Katchabaw was recently quoted in the on-line magazine itWorldCanada. They presented a series of articles on the billion dollar video gaming industry and how this industry touches most people either directly or indirectly. (article 1) (article 2)

Congratulations to Nic Santean and Chris Power for successfully defending their PhD Thesis. Nic's Thesis was entitled "Selected Topics on Sequential Machines" and he was supervised by Dr. Sheng Yu. Chris was supervised by Dr. Helmut Jurgensen and his thesis was entitled "Multi Modal Exploration".

Olga Veksler and Yuri Boykov are featured in the recent educational DVD "Computer Vision: Facts and Fiction" which was produced at the last IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in San Diego, California. (more)

Mike Katchabaw was recently quoted in the London Free Press in an article which discussed the delay in releasing the latest Playstation product. Sometimes software development has a hard time keeping up with hardware development. (more)

Recent merit-based scholarships awarded to Computer Science students include:

Marjorie (Beth) Locke:: Robert and Ruth Lumsden Scholarship in Science
Benjamin Sinnamon:: Class of '49 Prize
Robert Haworth:: Edna Jeffery Scholarship for Computer Science

On Thursday, March 9th, Lucian Ilie presented a talk entitled "Combinatorial Complexity Measures for Strings" at the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

On Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2005, Elena Losseva successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Errors Related to the Encoding of Information in DNA" and her supervisor was Dr. Lila Kari.

Congratulations to Hanan Lutfiyya who along with Mark Perry and Mike Bauer has received an NSERC Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) grant titled "Autonomic Computing in Grid Systems". The industrial partner is the IBM Centre of Advanced Studies in Toronto. (more)

Congratulations to Professors Michael Bauer and Mark Daley for being on the University Students' Council Teaching Honour Roll for the 2004-2005 academic year. (more)

On the invitation of HP Raghunandan, IBM Senior Project Manager, Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) India, Mark Perry presented a seminar on Autonomic Licensing, and a round table talk to the Tivoli team (also broadcasted to IBM Bangalore). (more)

Yuri Boykov and Olga Veksler have received a CFI New Opportunities grant. The awarded funds will provide the essential infrastructure for Dr. Boykov and Dr. Veksler to establish a new research laboratory for developing innovative computer vision and biomedical image analysis systems for 3D modeling from visual data. (more)

Microsoft and ATI Technologies have combined to help fund a new gaming lab in the department. The lab will be used to support two 4th year courses; one for game design and the other which centers on engine development. (more)

The Friday before Halloween, the department held it's annual Pumpkin Carving Contest. Eight teams participated, with Olga Veksler and Yuri Boykov's team emerging as this year's winners.

Mark Daley recently celebrated the 1 year anniversary of an IBM research initiative by showing a live demo of brain graphs being generated from the functional magnetic resonance imaging data of a postdoc. (more)

Mark Daley has been invited to participate in the Science Leadership Program being held May 2-4, 2013, at the University of Toronto. Only 8 people outside of U of T were chosen from across Canada to be SLP Fellows. Congratulations Mark! (more)

The winners of the DAPS competition held on campus during reading week included CS students Oluwakemi Ola (Kemi), Coby Scott Viner, Shunwei Zhu and Igor Milevskiy as well as CS professor Mike Katchabaw. Congratulations to the whole team for a job well done! (more)

Dr. Steven Beauchemin of the Computer Science Department at Western University is part of the RoadLAB group. The team are developing a driving assistance system aimed at minimizing driver error, which was recognized by the German Network of Automotive Excellence's (NoAE) Innovation Competition 2010. (more)

On Tuesday, December 11, 2012, Weiming Li successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Improvements on Seeding Based Protein Sequence Similarity Search" and his supervisor was Dr. Kaizhong Zhang. (more)

Rachel Powley, a first year Computer Science student at Western, is featured in a newsletter called "Strong Girls, Strong Canada: Leaders from the Start". Rachael was accepted as the only Canadian student in the Google Computer Science Summer Institute in California. Congratulations Rachel! (more)

On Oct. 22-23 Western hosted the Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing. These Regional conferences are modeled after the well-known Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) held annually in the USA. The goal of ONCWIC is to provide students, faculty and professional women in Ontario opportunities for networking, sharing and mentoring, similar to those provided by the GHC. (more)

Charles Ling was recently invited by the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (SGPS), to give a talk to all incoming graduate students to Western. Over 740 students attended the event. The talk was entitled "Crafting Your Research", based on his recently published book.

Nelson Andre and Andres Ayala Garcia were both featured in a CTV news segment which highlighted work on a Parkinson rehabilitation project which Mike Katchabaw is working on with Mandar Jog from LHSC/Lawson Research. (more)

Paul Vrbik recently co-authored a textbook entitled "Informal Introduction to Stochastic Processes with Maple". Paul is a PhD student in our department and is being supervised by Eric Schost and Marc Moreno Maza. Congratulations Paul! (more)

Congratulations to Laura Reid on being appointed as the Special Advisor on Community Engagement (Outreach) for the Faculty of Science. Laura's mandate is to engage Science`s academic missions of research, creativity, teaching and service with the broader community of London and elsewhere. (more)

It was announced June 27, 2012, that Stephen Watt has been elected a Fields Institute Fellow. The Fields Institute is a center for mathematical research activity - a place where mathematicians from Canada and abroad, from business, industry and financial institutions, can come together to carry out research and formulate problems of mutual interest. Stephen has served on the Board of Directors and various othe committees at the Fields Institute. Congratulations!

Andrew Delong has won an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. This year, there were 1254 applicants and only 98 fellowships were awarded. The Postdoctoral Fellowships Program provides support to a core of the most promising researchers at a pivotal time in their careers. The fellowships are also intended to secure a supply of highly qualified Canadians with leading edge scientific and research skills for Canadian industry, government and universities. (more)

Congratulations to Yanxin Li whose presentation won the Best Poster Award at the recent SHARCNET Research Day held at the University of Guelph. His poster was entitled "Towards Large Scale Automated Interpretation of Cytogenetic Biodosimetry Data". (more)

Mark Daley is part of a team, lead by Rhodri Cusack, which received a $545,000 CIHR/NSERC Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP) grant to study brain injury in newborn children. (more)

The Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS) Doctoral Dissertation Award is given annually to the top doctoral thesis in the areas covered by the Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) completed at a Canadian institution. This years recipient is Andrew Delong. Congratulations! (more)

Thank You The Computer Science Department would like to thank all its graduate, undergraduate and alumni volunteers who participated in Outreach Activities during the 2011/2012 school year. Some of our wonderful student/alumni volunteers are:

Nathan Bryans, Caleb Butler, Jenna Butler, Claudette Critchley, Stephanie Dorman, Amanda Godfrey-Wilson, Matt Holmes, Wahab Khan, Jeff Shantz, Celine Gravelines, Nelson Andre, Daniel Gauthier and Jordan Van Dyk

Thanks so much for all your help! We are very fortunate at Western to have such a fantastic student body!

The Department of Computer Science congratulates Roberto Solis-Oba for being recognized as one of Western's Faculty Scholars. The award was established to "honour and celebrate outstanding scholarly achievements at a critical point in the career of a faculty member at Western. This award recognize's outstanding contributions in research, teaching or service reflecting sustained excellence in all scholarly activities." Roberto's selection is based on his outstanding research achievements and excellent teaching and is one of only five awarded in the Faculty of Science.

Delegates from Central South University (CSU) of China, with whom the Department of Computer Science has established the 2+2 Joint Program, visited our campus on January 16, 2012 (more)

Omid Mola was one of 75 graduate students selected nationwide to attend the 2012 Google Graduate Researchers in Academia of Diverse backgrounds (GRAD) CS Forum which was held in January 18-20, 2012 in Mountain View, CA and San Francisco, CA. (more)

Ben Shirley recently received an MITACS Fellowship for the upcoming semester. The title of Ben's internship project is: "Development of an Information Theory-based Mutation Detector for a Commercial Bioinformatics Genome Server". (more)

On Monday, November 21, 2011, Zainab Al-Jazzaf successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Trust-Based Service Selection" and her supervisors were Dr. Mark Perry (Computer Science) and Dr. Miriam Capretz (Engineering). (more)

Olga Veksler and Yuri Boykov received a "Test-of-Time Award" at the top computer vision conference, the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2011), in recognition of their seminal work from 1999 called "Fast Approximate Energy Minimization via Graph Cuts." That work has been cited over 2000 times in the last decade. (more)

Professor Nazim Madhavji recently gave a keynote talk (http://pleiad.cl/iwpse-evol/keynotes.html), in memory of Prof. Meir M. Lehman at the joint international workshops: 12th International Workshop on Principles on Software Evolution and 7th ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution, held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering and the European Software Engineering Conference. (more)

On Friday, October 21, 2011, Yu Liu successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "A Problem in Graphics and Vision via Graph-Cut based Energy Optimization" and her supervisor was Dr. Olga Veksler. (more)

On Friday, September 16, 2011, Guo (Eric) Mei successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Improving Search Engine Results by Query Extension and Categorization" and his supervisor was Dr. Roberto Solis-Oba. (more)

Professor Watt was recently awarded the title Doctor Honoris Causa at a special convocation of the West University of Timisoara for exceptional academic and scientific achievements and his long-term support of that university's Computer Science department. At the convocation he spoke about "Computational Tools for Mathematical Collaboration". (more)

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced InkML as a new standard for the exchange of "digital ink". InkML may be used to store and exchange the output of electronic pens, including handwriting, mathematics, music, sketches and other notations. Professor Stephen Watt was the lead editor in the development of this standard. (more)

On Tuesday, August 30, 2011, Changbo Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Solving Polynomial Systems via Triangular Decomposition" and his supervisor was Dr. Marc Moreno Maza.

Yehia Kotb successfully defended his PhD thesis titled, "Workflow Net-Based Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems", on Wed. August 17. His doctoral work was supervised by Professors Steven Beauchemin and John Barron.

Professors Hanan Lutfiyya and Michael Bauer are two of 11 Ontario researchers awarded $3,347,385 from the Ontario Research Fund Research Excellence (ORF-RE) for developing next generation ultra-large-scale (ULS) software systems. (more)

On Tuesday, June 21, 2011, Andriy Miranskyy successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Models, Techniques, and Metrics for Managing Risk in Software Engineering" and his supervisors were Dr. Nazim Madhavji (Computer Science), Dr. Matt Davison and Dr. Mark Reesor (Applied Math).

Mark Daley recently presided over table 11 at the Royal Canadian Institute's Gala Dinner. This was a sold out $250/plate dinner which allowed participants to "Eat, drink and talk science with twenty-five of Canada's science stars!" (more)

Stephen Watt has been awarded one of two Distinguished University Professorship Awards for 2011, The University of Western Ontario’s highest recognition in academics. This award acknowledges sustained excellence in scholarship over a career, taking into consideration the full breadth of academics including research, teaching and service to the community. (more)

Mark Eramian, a PhD graduate of the Department of Computer Science was recently awarded the 2011 Provost’s Award for Outstanding Teaching at the University of Saskatchewan. Congratulations Mark! (more)

Lila Kari recently attended a "Celebration of Canada's Top Natural Sciences and Engineering Researchers" ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa. She had served on the NSERC joint Herzberg-Brockhouse-Polanyi Prize Committee, and the Herzberg Gold Medal was awarded to computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. (more)

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Wei Pan successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Algorithmic Contributions to the Theory of Regular Chains" and his supervisor was Dr. Marc Moreno Maza. (more)

On Monday, September 20, 2010, Remo Ferrari successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Interaction Between Requirements Engineering And Systems Architecting: An Emerging Theory" and his supervisor was Dr. Nazim Madhavji. (more)

On Tuesday, September 7, 2010, Halina Kaminski successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Service Level Agreement Negotiation Manager (SLAM4N)" and her supervisor was Dr. Mark Perry. (more)

Congratulations to the UWO teams for their excellent showing at the 2010 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest's Regional competition. They improved their final standings over last year's results. Good job! (more)

Steven Beauchemin's and Mike Bauer's RoadLab Project was recently featured on the September 9th airing of the Daily Planet show which is broadcast on the Discovery Channel.
(more)

25 Years Ago, Dr. A. K. Dewdney, professor emeriti of the Department of Computer Science, was instrumental in popularizing a recent (at the time) study of equations that undergo iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion. (more)

The Department of Computer Science wishes to congratulate Afroza Rahman on winning this years Biocomputing award which is presented by the Biocomputing Laboratory. Afroza receives the award in recognition of her research on two refinements of the ciliate computing template-guided recombination model, with improved descriptional complexity. (more)

Dave Martin & Aija Downing On Thursday, May 20th, the department held a gathering in the Grad Club to commemorate the careers of Dave Martin and Aija Downing and to celebrate their retirement. It goes without saying that the rest of the department is very appreciative of their hard work over the years. We all wish them the best.

Congratulations to Raphael Bahati and Michael Bauer, who received the Best Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium which was held last month in Osaka, Japan. The title of their paper was "Towards Adaptive Policy-based Management". (more)

Congratulations to Eric Schost who has been awarded an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement. The DAS Program provides substantial and timely resources to a small group of outstanding researchers who have a well-established research program, and who show strong potential to become international leaders in their respective area of research. The supplement is valued at $40,000 per year for three years.

Congratulations to the CS1033 Annual Poster Contest Winners for the spring 2010 term. Instructors selected the top 20 posters and the class then voted for their favourite. The winning posters were by: 1st - Jennifer Taylor, 2nd - Tiffany Champagne and 3rd - Laura Ryk. (more)

On Friday, March 19, 2010, Lei Xin successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Probability Scoring System for De Novo And Protein Identification with Tandem Mass Spectrometry" and his supervisor was Dr. Kaizhong Zhang. (more)

The Associate Editor for IEEE's Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence has picked a paper co-authored by Olga Veksler and Yuri Boykov to be included on his "All Time Favourite Top 10" list for TPAMI's 30th anniversary. (more)

All those interested in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are welcome to visit the page http://www.csd.uwo.ca/ACM-ICPC/ - which is devoted to UWO participants in the competition. The site contains some of the relevant information and pictures. (more)

On Monday, February 1, 2010, Brad Simmons successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Strategy Trees: A Novel Approach to Policy-Based Mgmnt" and his supervisor was Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya. (more)

USC The University Student Council's 2008-2009 Teaching Honour Roll includes the following Computer Science instructors: Michael Burrell, Claudette Critchley, Mark Daley, Lucian Ilie, Lila Kari and Sylvia Osborn. Congratulations to all on a job well done!

Congratulations to the UWO Mustangs and Disciples who competed in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest's Regional competition, held at McMaster University, on Saturday, October 31, 2009. Out of 115 schools, the Mustangs (Michael Friesen, Vadim Mazalov, and Jonathan Tieu) placed 32nd, and the Disciples (Nathan Bryans, Ilya Litvinov, and Alexander McCallum) placed 42nd. (more)

On Tuesday, October 13, 2009, Maia Hoeberechts successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "On the Foundations of Computability Theory" and her supervisor was Dr. Helmut Jürgensen. (more)

Charles Ling presented an invited keynote speech on the ADMA Conference (Advanced Data Mining and Applications) in Beijing, China, in August of 2009. He also chaired a Panel at the Conference on the Hot Topics of Data Mining. (more)

On Wednesday, September 2, 2009, Franziska Biegler successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "Decomposition and Descriptional Complexity of Shuffle on Words and Finite Languages" and her supervisors were Dr. Mark Daley & Dr. Kai Salomaa. (more)

Olga Veksler has received an Early Researcher Award from Ontario's Ministry of Research and Innovation. Ontario is providing $11.5 million to support 82 emerging researchers and their teams at 21 institutions across Ontario. Each lead researcher will receive $140,000 through this program. (more)

A recent issue of "Theoretical Computer Science" was dedicated to Sheng Yu in order to honor him and celebrate his 60th birthday (which isn't actually until next year). Congratulations Sheng on a well deserved honor. (more)

Stephen Watt is the General Chair of the upcoming Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2009) to be held in Grand Bend, Ontario from July 6th to the 12th. (more)

Steven Beauchemin was an invited speaker at a recent meeting of the local Project Management Institute chapter. The meeting was held at the Windermere Manor and the title of Steven's talk was "Failures in Project Management". (more)

Sardar Anisul Haque The Department of Computer Science wishes to congratulate Sardar Anisul Haque on winning this years Biocomputing award which is presented by the Biocomputing Laboratory. The award is in recognition of his research paper proposing an ingenious and novel DNA Computing algorithm for solving the 3-Satisfiability Problem, that avoided an exponential blow-up of the search space.

The Department of Computer Science wishes to congratulate Maia Hoeberechts on winning this years Science Outreach and Recruitment Award. Her tireless efforts at Outreach functions and especially on recruitment of future female computer science students is much appreciated. (more)

The Department of Computer Science would like to congratulate Jeffrey Shantz for receiving an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS-M). (more)

Congratulations to Xin Li and Wei Pan who have been selected as winners for the MITACS Award: Best Novel Use of Mathematics in Technology Transfer. Their paper was entitled "Integrating High-Performance Polynomial Arithmetic into Maple" (more)

Peter Rogan recently presented a paper entitled "Ab Initio Exon Definition Using an Information Theory-based Approach" at the 43rd Annual conference on Information Sciences and Systems at Johns Hopkins University. This conference is sponsored by the IEEE Information Theory Society. (more)

Congratulations to Jonathan Leaver on receiving an Edna Jeffery Scholarship. His scholarship was awarded for achieving the highest standing in the second year of an Honors Specialization in Computer Science. (more)

The University of Western Ontario has placed 3rd in scienceWATCH.com's latest ranking of Canadian Universities with the highest impact in Computer Science. Rankings are based on average number of citations per paper published from 2003 to 2007. (more)

Peter Rogan is one of four researchers from The University of Western Ontario who were announced as the university's newest Canada Research Chairs. The funding value of the four Chairs announced for Western totals $3.8 million. (more)

Congratulations to Steven Beauchemin who was nominated Vice-President - Education, and became a Member of the Board of Directors of PMI-SWOC, on January 1st 2009. (more)

On Thursday, December 11, 2007, He Wang successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Fine Grained Role Graph Model" and his supervisor was Dr. Sylvia Osborn. (more)

Jenna Cameron has been selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award 2009, sponsored by Microsoft Research. CONGRATULATIONS! (more)

Over 40% of the 225 employees at London-based software company TVWorks, are University of Western Ontario graduates. Their goal is to be the "employer of choice" for graduating technology students. (more)

Drs. Michael Bauer (Computer Science) and Stewart McIntyre (Chemistry) have been awarded $1.7M by CANARIE to lead a multi-institutional project entitled "Science Studio". The system will permit remote access to or control of scientific experiments. (more)

On Monday, August 18, 2008, Geoff Wozniak successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Structuring Data via Behavioural Synthesis" and his supervisors were Dr. Mark Daley and Dr. Stephen Watt. (more)

On Friday, August 15, 2008, Shihyen Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Topics in Computing Similarity and Distance" and his supervisors were Dr. Kaizhong Zhang and Dr. Bin Ma. (more)

Google frequently hosts technical talks at their offices. Recently, Jamie Andrews gave a talk entitled "What's Wrong With My Program?". These talks are videotaped and are then put up on YouTube. Jamie's Talk can be seen here.

Representatives from the Computer Science Department joined with area Information Technology professionals in a Town Hall format to discuss the future of London's IT industry and the war for IT talent. (more)

On Thursday, May 22, the UWO Computer Science Department ran the "Robot Balloon Pop" event at the Science Olympics. Teams from participating schools arrived at the event with pre-built and pre-programmed Lego robots, ready to go at the other competitors' balloons. (more)

Mark Perry and Mike Katchabaw were two of the four Western researchers who delivered 20-minute lectures about the impact technology has had on society at the seventh annual Scientific Journey held on May 2. Mark gave his talk via the internet from New Zealand. (more)

Congratulations to Steven Beauchemin who is part of a team of 7 professors at 4 different universities who received a $489,800.00 grant over 3 years to build "in-car" intelligent systems to train and re-train drivers. The research funds were obtained through Auto21, a Canadian automotive research grant agency. (more)

Once again, the CS033 Multimedia & Communications class had their bi-annual poster contest. The purpose of this competition is to give students an opportunity to work on a "real - live" project for a department who will use their poster as part of their major marketing campaign. (more)

In its most recent Idea to Innovation (I2I) Program competition, NSERC awarded Michael Katchabaw $125,000 to further the development of the Algorithmic Music Evolution Engine (AMEE) developed at Western. Obtaining the funding was a group effort as PhD candidate Maia Hoeberechts, MSc graduate Ryan Demopoulos, and the Industry Liaison (IL) team all played a pivotal role. (more)

On Friday, December 7, 2007, Sorin Constantinescu successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "On the Complexity of Strings" and his supervisor was Dr. Lucian Ilie. (more)

Yuri Boykov was one of only 79 researchers in Canada to receive Discovery Accelerator Supplements from NSERC this year. NSERC was able to award a total of $3.16 million as a result of the recent federal budget. (more)

On Tuesday, September 4, 2007, Laurentiu Dragan successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "On Measuring and Optimizing the Performance of Parametric Polymorphism" and his supervisor was Dr. Stephen Watt. (more)

On Thursday, August 9, 2007, Qing Zhao successfully defended her PhD thesis. The title of her thesis was "SC-expressions in Object-Oriented Languages" and her supervisor was Dr. Sheng Yu. (more)

Friends and colleagues recently attended a colloquium in Germany to celebrate Helmut Jürgensen's 65th Birthday. A number of talks were presented by colleagues from around the world and Lynda Robbins presented a video greeting from Western's Computer Science Department which was created by Maia Hoeberechts. (more)

Congratulations to Steven Beauchemin who won the CIPPRS/ACTIRF Award for Research Excellence and Service to the Research Community 2007 presented at the 4rd Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV2007) May 28-30, Montreal, Quebec

Congratulations to Yehia Kotb who co-authoured a paper with John Barron and Steven Beauchemin entitled "Petri Net-Based Cooperation In Multi-Agent Systems" and won the best paper award at the Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision in May in Montreal.

Jeff Taylor has been invited by the Teaching Support Centre to participate in their workshops for graduate students. He will have his UWORCS talk videotaped to be shown as an example of how to best present a technical talk, making it interesting and at the same time accessible to the lay public. (more)

On Monday, April 30, 2007, Amr Abdel-Dayem successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Computer Aided Diagnostic for Carotid Artery Ultrasound and Breast Mammogram" and his supervisor was Dr. Mahmoud EL-Sakka. (more)

The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum to exchange ideas, discuss solutions and share experiences. The conference offers a great opportunity to learn about the state of research activities within the Department of Computer Science. We are pleased to announce that UWORCS'07 has been scheduled for Monday, April 2, 2007. (more)

Mark Daley gave a talk on Mathematical Modeling of Biological Processes at the Second Annual Canadian Student Conference on Biomedical Computing which took place March 16-18 at the University Hospital Auditorium. (more)

Olga & Yuri A patent entitled "System and method for fast approximate energy minimization via graph cuts" (owned by Cornell University) and based on imaging research by Olga Veksler and Yuri Boykov, has recently been licensed to Google to be used for geospatial image stitching in Google Earth ( http://earth.google.com/).

Sylvia Osborn gave an invited keynote speech at Privacy, Security and Trust 2006, in Markham, ON, on Nov. 1, 2006. The title of her talk was "Role-based Access Control: Past, Present and Future. (more)

The World Wide Web consortium has published the "Last Call Working Draft" for InkML. InkML provides a platform-independent representation for digital ink. Stephen Watt was an editor and author of the InkML specification (more)

Congratulations to Qian Zhao who recieved the Best Paper Award at the IEEE/IARIA International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems held in July in Silicon Valley. Qian is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Mark Perry. (more)

Mike Katchabaw was recently featured in the on-line technical magazine ITBusiness.ca in an article about the department's new Gaming Program. It discusses our involvement with Microsoft's new XNA game development kits which target Microsoft's Xbox 360. (more)

Congratulations to Franziska Biegler who recently received the Jacob-Jacobi Award for 2005/2006. This prize is awarded by the Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam to the best graduate of the year in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Potsdam University, Germany. (more)

Congratulations to Shiva Mohan who was recently selected to join the prestigious IBM Extreme Blue intern team at the Toronto Research Labs. (more)

Congratulations to Lila Kari who has been awarded a renewal of her Canada Research Chair in Biocomputing. The term of her extension will run from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2011.

Mike Katchabaw has been in demand lately. He has recently been quoted in two seperate articles about the gaming industry. The first article talked about violence in games and the second one (which no longer seems to be available on-line), in the local Exeter Times-Advocate, talked about internet/game addiction.

Jeff Taylor recently won the Dean's Award for Research Excellence for the second place oral presentation in the Physical Sciences session at the 2006 Western Research Forum. His talk was entitled "On the Use of Classifier Committees For Automated Text Categorization Tasks". Jeff credits his good showing to the feedback he received at the 2006 UWORCS sessions.

Congratulations to Cosmin Oancea and Nic Santean for being awarded an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowships provide financial support to promising researchers to further pursue their research at a university or at a research institute.

"We aren't in the ivory tower looking down on things". Mike Katchabaw was recently quoted in an article in the National Post addressing the debate on whether technology students lack real-world skills. (more)

An algorithm developed by Marc Moreno Maza, which was presented in a much-cited paper, has been given a parallel implementation by gradute student Yuzhen Xie. The algorothm has previously been implemented in three seperate computer algebra systems. (more)

Not sure which Department or Faculty you should have talked to at the recent UWO Open House? Maybe you should check out some of the recent news articles which point out how there is a real risk of a personnel shortage in the Information Technology field. (more)

Irene Gargantini, who earned the degree of Dottore in Fisica (1956) from the then-highly-reputed University of Milan, has been recognized by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies (CAS) as a Canadian Pioneer in Computing. This honour recognizes her significant contribution to the development of computing education and research in Canada. (more)

Marjorie (Beth) Locke has been selected for Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award 2006, sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. CONGRATULATIONS! Beth was one of only four Canadians to be selected for this award. (more)

Professor Mike Katchabaw was recently interviewed for an article in the Canadian Technology News entitled "The Games People Play". Mike addressed the fact that game-playing has recently become useful in applications other than entertainment. (more)

The Computer Science department is proud to be involved with IBM to run a Women in Technology Chapter. The purpose of this program is to visit elementary schools and provide a webpage design workshop for grade 7 and 8 girls.
Started in 2003-2004, the response to the school visits has been overwhelmingly positive. (more)

Biocomputing describes scientific research that is looking at how biology does computation and to what extent DNA can be can be used to devise a new kind of computer. But the burgeoning field promises to do much more than that, says world-renown researcher Lila Kari, associate professor of computer science at Western where she holds a Canada Research Chair in biocomputing. (more)

Graduate student Micha Galizia has made a new contribution to the linux kernel. He added Human Interface Device usage for the Logitech UltraX Media Remote. (more)

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, Cosmin Oancea successfully defended his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Parametric Polymorphism for Software Component Architectures" and his supervisor was Dr. Stephen Watt.

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