Established in 1964, the Department of Computer Science at Western has developed strong academic and research programs to become one of the leading establishments in its field. Our faculty are the recipients of many teaching and research awards. We are home to a vibrant and dynamic department with much to offer to undergraduate students, graduate students and visitors.
Western was named today among the top destinations in the world to study – and launch a career in – Game Design, according to The Princeton Review’s seventh annual rankings of the best undergraduate and graduate schools ... (March 15, 2016) (more)
Western News
Jörn Diedrichsen was profiled in the March 9 Western News. As the Western Research Chair for Motor Control and Computational Neuroscience, and part of the Brain and Mind Institute, Diedrichsen explores how the brain produces movement, particularly for the hand ... (more)
GlucoGuide on CTV
Charles Ling was interviewed by the CTV 6pm news on January 29. Along with John Wreford of GlucoGuide he introduced some of the features of the GlucoGuide app... (Watch Here!)
Western News
Mouth Abuaysha, third year Computer Science Student and research assistant at Western’s Brain and Mind Institute, was profiled in Western News on Januay 21, 2016. In "Computer Science student takes ambition into another dimension", they reported on how he uses 3D printing to explore ways to assist individuals with a wide array of physical limitations... (more)
Canadian Diabetes Expo
Charles Ling, with some of his graduate students and members of GlucoGuide, show-cased their diabetes management App in Toronto's CDA Diabetes Expo. It was well received. Several celebs also came to see the GlucoGuide system. (more) Coming to London, Nov. 28
MacLeans Magazine
Two Computer Science alumni, Claudette Critchley and Jenna Butler, as well the Dean of Science, Charmaine Dean, are featured in an advertorial entitled "Women in Computing" in the latest MacLeans Magazine. Get your copy today! (more)(more)
Lila Kari was recently presented with the Rozenberg Tulip Award at the 21st International conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming. This award recognizes a prominent scientist - the DNA Computer Scientist of the Year - who has shown continuous contributions, pioneering, original contributions, and who has influenced the development of the field.
Imagine a world where people converse with someone who appears to be in a vegetative state, or hospitals where critical care teams detect a looming crisis long before it erupts. “As far as I know, we’re the first group in the world doing this,” said Mark Daley, principal investigator for the Brain and Mind Institute at Robarts Research Institute. (more)
The Computer Science Department at Western University would like to thank Amazon Web Services again for their generous donation of 3500 dollars worth of credits towards their cloud services. This year, the third year database course will be using Amazon Virtual Machines to make PHP online applications that access back-end databases. THANK YOU AMAZON!
On Thursday, May 21, 2015, Ruipeng Lu gave a platform presentation entitled "Discovery of Primary, Cofactor, and Novel Transcription Factor Binding Site Motifs by Recursive, Thresholded Entropy Minimization" at the 2015 Compute Ontario Research Day conference at the Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.
Charles Ling launched GlucoGuide, a research spinoff for diabetes management and wellness, on May 15 in London. Over 60 people attended including researchers and healthcare managers from US, Toronto, and KW. Dignitaries included Mayor Matt Brown, Federal Minister of State for Science and Technology Ed Holder, and Western VP Research Dr. John Capone. (more)
Congratulations to Jenna Butler, who competed for Western at 3MT Ontario 2015 and earned second place. The competition was held Thursday, April 23, at the Ivy Business School. Jenna's talk covered her PhD research under supervisor Dr. Mark Daley.
Dr. Yuri Boykov and Dr. Olga Veksler have been awarded an NSERC Research Tools & Instruments Grant for close to $96,000. This grant covers the purchase of high-performance workstations for a combinatorial approach to their research. The grant will be good for one year with the possibility for a one year extension.
Dr. Charles Ling will give a keynote talk at the 2015 Canadian Undergraduate Computer Science Conference to be held July 8th to 11th at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. The title of Charles' talk is "How to Choose A Graduate Program? Or not at all?". An abstract of his talk can be found at http://cucsc.ok.ubc.ca/en/keynotes.php.
Dr. Steven Beauchemin will give an invited symposium talk at the 2015 Computer and Robot Vision Conference on instrumented vehicles. The title of Steven's talk is ""Vehicular Instrumentation for the Study of Driver Intent and Related Applications". An abstract of his talk can be found at www.computerrobotvision.org.
Marc Moreno Maza has been awarded a professorship under the CAS President's International Fellowship Initiative for Visiting Scientists by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This very distinguished award is received by 200 foreign scholars across all disciplines and laboratories of the Chinese Academy Sciences. The funds associated will support a joint research project between Chongqing Institute of Green & Intelligent Technology (CIGIT) and the research group of Marc Moreno Maza. These funds will also enable a summer school and mini-courses. (more)
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Joern Diedrichsen, who is currently at University College of London, has accepted a faculty position at Western between Computer Science and Statistics & Acturial Science. He will start September 2015. Joern is coming in as a Western chair in computational neuroscience with interest in computational models, motor control and analysis of MRI data of the human cerebellum. (more)
Robert Goldfarb, a fourth year double Major in Computer Science and Medical Science at Western University, is an aspiring entrepreneur whose ease with innovation and willingness to assume calculated risks and learn from experience has prepared him for his latest opportunity: to shadow Aly Rahemtulla, President and CEO of BSM Wireless. (more)
Kemi Ola’s research mission is to dethrone the deadliest animal on the planet; the mosquito. With rising cross-border trade, international tourism and global-warming, malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases are reappearing in regions where they had been eradicated and are spreading to new geographic locations including North America. (more)
Stephen Watt has been appointed dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. “Stephen Watt’s experience as an administrator is combined with a track record of distinguished scholarship and strong experience in private sector leadership,” said Ian Orchard, Waterloo's vice-president, academic and provost. (more)
Paul Parsons and Maryam Khordad were among the Western researchers who were recently awarded best poster in the Science of Information category at the Western Interdisciplinary Science Showcase, which was a research showcase led by Western Science highlighting prescient research taking place across campus.(more)
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Anwar Haque, an Associate Director at Bell Canada, will teach a course in Advanced Networks/Distributed systems for both undergraduate (CS 4457) and graduate students(course number to be determined). Dr. Haque is currently an Associate Director at Bell Canada where he oversees Bell`s service costing, as well as the company’s multi-million-dollar network capital portfolios.(more)
Former CSD undergrad Coby Viner and Professor Peter Rogan are among the co-authors of a paper which outlines some recent discoveries which may allow some women with breast cancer to avoid chemotherapy. The research which led to this finding used computers to probe mutations that until now have been invisible.(more)(London Free Press)
Computer Science graduate Kan Gao has done it again. He has followed up his award winning game "To The Moon" with another well received game called "A Bird Story". Gao describes the game as "the simplest but most difficult thing I've had to make," and it's not hard to see why. This hour-long spectacle manages to convey narrative through its visual cues, without a single letter or digit to drive it. (more1)(more2)
Even with access to 200 million pages of content, consuming four terabytes of disk storage, IBM’s Watson supercomputer wasn’t able to answer correctly every question during its 2011 Jeopardy appearance. The computer sometimes faltered and flopped – seemingly failing to understand the questions. Computer Science graduate student Lareina Milambiling’s research explores why that is, and looks to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and natural language – in the gaming industry.
New Faculty
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Daniel Lizotte, who is currently at the University of Waterloo, has accepted a faculty position at Western between Computer Science and Epidemiology. He will start January 1, 2015. Dan is interested in the areas of machine learning, reinforcement learning, and statistics, particularly as they apply to problems in medical health informatics.
Mark Daley is one of the researchers at Western University who are using IBM Cloud and Analytics to watch regions of the human brain communicating with each other to diagnose and describe brain disorders in real time.
Teaching Award
Jenna Butler has received a Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. This award is given based on evidence of excellence in academic endeavours with particular emphasis on exceptional performance in undergraduate classroom teaching and undergraduate course/curriculum development. The official presentation will be made at the Faculty and Staff Recognition lunch in December. Congratulations Jenna!
Charles Ling was recently awarded an NSERC i2i (Idea to Innovation) grant for the R&D of GlucoGuide, a data-analytic based system for people with diabetes. For more info, see http://cling.csd.uwo.ca/GlucoGuide.html. In addition, he was recently awarded NSERC Engage Grants (EG) entitled "Personalized content management using collaborative filtering" with Arcane Digital Inc. in London.
Western Computer Science would like to thank GitHub for their support once again in providing free, private Git repositories for use in our courses here in the department. Among other courses, students in the third year networking course will use GitHub to submit their assignment code, all the while gaining experience with Git, a relevant and in-demand version control system.
At the recent Compute Ontario Research Day held at the Perimiter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Computer Science undergraduate student Coby Viner received the Best Talk Award for his talk entitled "Validation of Predicted mRNA Splicing Mutations Using High-throughput Transcriptome Data". Congratulations and well deserved!
Jenna Butler was recently awarded a 2014 University Students’ Council Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Sponsored by Alumni Western, the award demonstrates the value Western students place on quality teaching and outstanding professors. The winners have dedicated a significant amount of time to enhance classroom learning, and have inspired their students through their passion and care.
Infrastructure Innovation
Steven Beuachemin has received a grant through the Ministry of Transportation Ontario's Highway Infrastructure Innovation Funding Program for a proposal titled "The Role of Environmental Information in Predicting and Directing Driver Intent" The grant is about understanding how Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) information can a) influence the sensing and functionality of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems and b) influence short and long term driver decision making (intent).
Distinguished Research
Charles Ling and Yuri Boykov have both been selected to receive Distinguished Research Professorship Awards. Terms of the research professorship will be for one year and will allow an opportunity for a dedicated full-time effort in research. Selection will be made on the basis of a distinguished record in research and a special opportunity which the release may offer. Congratulations Charles and Yuri.
The Computer Science department would like to congratulate Oluwakemi (Kemi) Ola on winning the people's choice award at the 3MT (3 Minute Thesis) competition held April 10, 2014. 3MT is a research communication competition where graduate students have 3 minutes or less to present their research and its impact to a panel of non-specialist judges and peers. Well done Kemi!
CS1033 announced the winners for it's bi-annual poster contest. This year the students designed posters for the Epilepsy Support Centre. The winning poster will be used extensively in this year's marketing campaign. Josh's poster was selected out of over 700 posters. Congratulations! The other top seven posters can be found here.
Lila Kari has been named Editor-in-Chief of the premium theoretical journal in Europe entitled "Theoretical Computer Science". This journal has been published by Elsevier since 1975. The journal publishes 52 issues a year and is abstracted and indexed by Scopus and the Science Citation Index.
Shenglong Gao was recently chosen for The NEXT 36 program, one that aims to bolster young entrepreneurs in order to help them become innovative leaders of tomorrow. The highly selective program sees more than 1,000 applications across Canada each year.
Award of Merit
At the Science's Faculty and Staff Recognition lunch, Laura Reid received the Dean's Special Award of Merit for service. The Dean especially noted Laura's efforts in outreach for the Faculty of Science. Great job and Congratulations Laura.
Mike Katchabaw was recently interviewed on Rogers TV's Daytime London Show. The topic of discussion was the state of video game development in Canada, London and Western University with special emphasis on the new Diploma in Game Development program. The Department of Computer Science at Western has had a Game Development program for the last 10 years and has ties to game development companies in London and across Canada.
CANARIE has approved funding of $652,000 for the Network Enabled Platform project: “Research and Educational Activities using Laboratory Mechatronics (REALM)”, with Michael Bauer as the Principal Investigator. The objective of REALM is to exploit and generalize previous work done in the Science Studio project so that it can be used by a wide range of researchers to observe, control and collect data from remote experiments in environments that are not easily accessible by reason of distance or danger.
Amazon AWS Grant
Jeff Shantz has received an Amazon AWS in Education Coursework Grant. The grant will allow students enrolled in CS 2212b in Winter 2014 to work with Amazon AWS technologies. As part of their group project, the students will be creating a clone of a popular online service using Amazon technologies such as EC2, S3, and DynamoDB. Amazon operates the largest public cloud in the world, powering some of the most popular web services such as Netflix, Pinterest, Dropbox, and reddit.
NSERC Grant
Professors Hanan Lutfiyya and Abdallah Shami (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) have received an NSERC Strategic Grant. Cloud computing (CC) solutions are available, where a pool of virtualized, dynamically-scalable, computing power and storage are delivered on demand to clients over the Internet. This strategic grant will be used to fund research that can be used to allow providers to include networking as a service.
Seed Grant
Mike Katchabaw is part of an interdisciplinary team that received a Collaborative Research Seed Grant (CRSG) for a project titled: "Establishing the Western Collaboration for Integration of Consumer Technology and Healthcare (CICTH) Research Group". The focus of this work is to leverage consumer technologies like smart phones, game consoles, and various wearable technologies to create novel and innovative applications for rehabilitation and health care.
Hanan Lutfiyya is part of a Western University research team which has won Western's first-ever Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) Award. Their proposal, Robust Energy-Efficient Data Center Resource Provisioning in an SDN environment, was the only Canadian winner in the ‘Big Data and Network’ theme and one of only three Canadian proposals to receive an award.
Charles Ling was Invited by the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (SGPS), for the second year, to give a talk to all incoming graduate students to Western in the Graduate Student Orientation on Sept 3, 2013. The title of the talk: Crafting Your Research Future.
Lately the availablity of jobs in the Information Technology field has been on the rise. The following are links to articles in local and national newspapers which discuss this situation:
Tech Jobs Will Boom In Canada, But Country Lacks People To Fill Them -- Canada’s economy will create at least 218,000 tech jobs between now and 2020, but lacks the people to fill them, says a new report from a not-for-profit think tank. Huffingtonpost Canada (March 2016)
Degrees With Best Rate of Return - A study, which analyzed more than seven million resumes on the Workopolis job search website, found degrees that showed the highest percentage working in jobs related to their education included nursing (97 per cent); pharmacy (94 per cent); computer science (91 per cent); engineering (90 per cent) and human resources (88 per cent). Globe and Mail (Aug 7/14)
Top 2 Jobs are CS Jobs - All jobs aren’t created equal. In fact, some are simply better than the rest. U.S. News 100 Best Jobs of 2014 offer a mosaic of employment opportunity, good salary, manageable work-life balance and job security. This year the top 2 jobs are Computer Science related jobs!
Best and Worst MSc Degrees for Jobs - Check out this Forbes article on best and worst MSc degrees for jobs. Computer Science comes in at number 2 for best.
Why Canada is failing at tech - Computer science and technology is another sector that can be included in the ongoing skills-gap crisis in Canada, according to Ryan Holmes, CEO of social media management company HootSuite. Holmes suggests a sustained engagement with educators, at both the high school and PSE levels, is a logical first step to encouraging youth to pursue studies in computer science. He also suggests that the tech sector do a better job of promoting the image of software engineering as creative, inventive, and “sexy.” Financial Post (Jul 10/13)
Best Computer Jobs for the Future - Trying to determine your ideal IT career path? Want to know which computer jobs will be in the greatest demand, offer the highest salaries and best opportunities for advancement once you finish training? ITCareerFinder assembled this comparison of the decade’s hottest technology careers to serve as your guide. These 10 computer jobs will experience the fastest growth through 2020, pay salaries well above the national average, boast top employment rates and offer a range of advancement opportunities.www.itcareerfinder.com
Hot News
Western Tech Alumni - workshops for students about how to get a job, run an interview prep program, and use the alumni network.
