RBC Research Prize 2017: UofT Faculty and Student Winners

RBC and the University of Toronto recently partnered up to create the RBC Innovation Fellowship program, a joint venture designed to recognize exceptional faculty and graduate students and to provide them with additional resources to advance their research.

The RBC Research Prize 2017 winners come from a variety of disciplines, including Machine Learning and Advanced Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, and User Experience Design/Design Thinking/Human-Machine Interfaces.
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This years RBC Fellowship Winner is DGP’s own Varun Perumal, a Human-Computer interaction researcher and bonafide hardware engineering fanatic, whose Printem film makes it possible for anyone with a home printer to produce their own electronic circuit boards.
Varun gave RBC a brief overview of his winning proposal in an interview:

“My research is primarily about creating novel fabrication techniques the process of making physical things that will change the future of how we manufacture. Just as 3D printing has made advances in decentralizing and speeding up the production of mechanical products, we’re trying to do something similar for electronics, mainly the components that go into your devices.”

This year’s RBC Research Prize Winners are Gerald Penn and Cosmin Munteanu.

The faculty members also gave a brief overview of their winning proposal:

“One of the interesting challenges we’re facing is that everyone’s jumping on the AI bandwagon, but we don’t have a very good human interface for it yet. In the finance world, for example, high-level financial analysts these are people who do long-term planning for large investment firms or banks €“ still use pen and paper. It’s shock from a tech perspective. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but they’re not benefitting from all these machine learning and NLP advances. The essence of our proposal is to make sure these people can benefit from the technology and to address the problem that the software currently available to support these tasks isn’t designed well for their purposes.”

Full interviews and more details about the winning proposals are available on the RBC Institute for Research website.

Upcoming Tux Talk By Anind Dey on 7th Nov, 2017

Anind Dey:
Routines and Behaviors: Leveraging everyday routines to enhance interactive systems

2017-11-07 12:30 at MaRS

Abstract

Commodity smart phones and initial Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have made the visions of ubiquitous computing common place. However, despite the rapid adoption of this technology, we have not progressed much past the use of location-based systems in commercial ubicomp systems. The Ubicomp Lab at Carnegie Mellon University has been using peoples interactions with such devices to better understand human behaviour and routines. In this talk, I will describe the value of leveraging human behaviors and routines in interactive mobile and IoT-based systems. I will demonstrate how the ability to opportunistically extract these routines (and anomalies) can dramatically enhance interactive systems in a number of domains, including healthcare, driving, education, and sustainability, as they can be used to create effective interventions and supporting systems.

Bio

Anind K. Dey is the Charles M. Geschke Professor and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the director of the Ubicomp Lab, which performs research at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction and machine learning, in the areas of mobile computing, health and sustainability among others. He has authored over 100 papers on these
topics and serves on the editorial board of several journals. In 2015, Anind was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy for his work on context-aware and adaptive systems. Anind received his PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech, along with a Masters of Science in both Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering. He received his Bachelors of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University.

More information about the 2017/2018 Tux presentation series is available on the official Tux website

New Faculty for the 2017/2018 Academic Year

Faculty Appointments 2017/2018

We’re thrilled to welcome the next wave of U of T computer science faculty, many of whom are jointly appointed with cognate departments, enabling us to significantly expand computer sciences collaborations with multiple disciplines across campus.”

Ravin Balakrishnan, Professor & Chair