Research NewsAutumn 2009

GRAND (GRaphics, Animation and New MeDia) is a national scale Networked Center of Excellence that brings together industry participants, academic researchers, artists and directors from across Canada to develop new technologies and methodologies in 3 key areas to our current and future economy:

(1)New Media (2)Games and Interactive Simulation (3)Animation, Graphics and Imaging

The Faculty of Computer Science, in partnership with the Cineflux Lab at NSCAD University is engaged in two projects within the GRAND network: Digital Media Production, and Virtual Worlds. Digital Media and Film Production The integration of remote avatars or virtual actors into shared spaces often imposes constraints on the realism, believability and artistic control of rendered content, while real-time data acquired during interaction and performance is not fully exploited in current post-production systems. This project will enhance the next generation of live performance technologies in a manner that supports the task-specific demands of communication, interaction, and production. Our approach to realizing these objectives entails further development and integration of several enabling technologies, including video acquisition and display architectures, spatially

The GRAND Research Network

reactive lights and cameras, tetherless tracking, and novel GIS-like production interfaces. Virtual Worlds Procedural modeling of 3D objects offers an unsurpassed capability of synthesizing complex scenes (e.g. plants and ecosystems, terrains, buildings and cities), and thus has a wide range of potential applications. They include the creation of virtual worlds for computer games, generation of complex scenery for computer animations, and computer-assisted landscape, urban and architectural design. Video game production is facing challenges, mainly due to the need for ever-larger virtual worlds; teams of scene designers and graphics programmers are becoming as large as entire film crews. Procedural scene creation is thus becoming a very attractive solution. Until now, however, applications of procedural models have been limited to a relatively small number of well-crafted special cases. We propose to examine the limiting factors, and develop methods that will extend the usage of procedural methods.

Faculty of Computer ScienceNews - Events - Opportunities

DALHOUSIE I YUN VE TRS I

New and Current Projects

The Web InformationFiltering Lab

The Web Information Filtering Lab (WIFL) was formed in 2000 shortly after Computer Science moved into its new building. The mission of the Lab is to pursue research that will improve user access to large text datasets as exemplified by the Web. Many good students, from undergraduate to doctoral, have fueled the research, led by Mike Shepherd, Carolyn Watters and Jack Duffy. The research falls into 3 main areas; user interaction on the Web, adaptive user profiles, and classification of web pages. The user interaction research includes web browsing on small-screen devices,

News

GenGIS: Visualization, geography and genetics: together at last!

multi-session web tasks, categorization of the kinds of tasks users perform on the web, novel navigation of search results, and the design of additional functionality for web browsers to help users accomplish tasks. Adaptive user profiles allow systems to select material on an individual basis on the Web. In WIFL the focus of adaptive user profiles has been on tasks such as reading newspapers and browsing the Web, which are intrinsic in nature. This makes it difficult to predict what news articles or web pages a user would be interested in viewing at any given time. User profiles in this context change over time, so that the profiles must be sensitive to new interests while not “forgetting” previous interests. The third major area of research is the classification of web pages by genre. The genre of a web page, such as FAQ or personal home page, can be used to improve the results of a Web search by matching the genres of the retrieved web pages to the task of the user. WIFL research examines combinations of genre attributes as well classifiers, feature sets, and number of features to represent a genre. With the dependence on the Web continuing to grow and search engines vying with each other to improve search results to attract users. WIFL is no danger of running out of interesting research

Everyone has heard of the Human Genome Project, but this endeavour is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to learning about the genetic basis of life. New technologies are now allowing researchers to determine the DNA sequence of bacteria that cause tuberculosis, botulism, salmonella, and a host of other diseases. And people are now taking these technologies into the field to study biodiversity at a level of detail that could not have been imagined twenty years ago. The outcomes of this work will teach us about the microbial communities that keep us healthy, and what goes wrong when we get sick, leading to new therapeutic techniques beyond the blunt hammer of antibiotics. Beyond this, we will be able to pin down the

supports statistical analysis, screen captures and movies, and custom analyses written

in the Python scripting language. GenGIS is free and open source.

http://kiwi.cs.dal.ca/GenGIS/Main_Page

workings of the key players in all sorts of industrial processes including wastewater treatment and the cleanup of contaminated industrial sites. The analysis of these genetic data sets, which can comprise millions of genes and billions of letters of DNA, is not trivial: bioinformatics is all about making sense of these genetic sequences and understanding how organisms and communities work and how they change over time. A new direction in bioinformatics ties genetic data to geography and habitat data, to explain the spread of disease and to determine the key environmental factors that shape biodiversity. With this goal in mind, Dalhousie CS researchers Rob Beiko, Stephen Brooks and Christian Blouin, along with Jacqui Whalley from the Auckland University of Technology have developed GenGIS, a geospatial information system for environmental genomic data. GenGIS is all about the fusion of genetic data with digital maps in a 3D visual environment. Developing GenGIS has required us to come up with new algorithms for 3D GIS visualization, the display of genetic data on a map, and optimal layout of trees to show hierarchical relationships among data collected from distinct geographic locations. We have already used GenGIS to study microbial biodiversity in the ocean, pathways of human migration, and the patterns of HIV-1 infection in Africa. The 2009 H1N1v 'swine flu' pandemic was studied on an unprecedented genetic scale: mirroring trends in Free and Open Source software, swine flu genetic data were available online within days of their collection, and we were able to use GenGIS to track its spread in geographic and evolutionary terms. Different aspects of GenGIS has been described in journal articles and conferences. PhD student and Killam scholar Donovan Parks received a Best Conference Paper award for his presentation about optimal tree layout algorithms at Geoinformatics 2009. Undergraduate students Suwen Wang and Harman Clair developed new 3D GIS features, and undergraduate (and prospective MSc student) Mike Porter tied it all together with a user interface that

News

GenieKnows Inc andDalhousie FCS

Designed to showcase the research strength of the Faculty of Computer Science, this innovative new series of workshops was launched in the fall of 2008. An initiative of Dean Michael Shepherd and Associate Dean -Research Evangelos Milios, the objective is to create University-Industry partnerships in the areas of research and development. The first workshop in the series was held November 27, 2008, on the topic of Electronic Health. The event attracted 25 participants, including a senior member of the IT team for the Nova Scotia Department of Health, who contributed as one of the panelists. The second workshop, held on May 1, 2009, was on the timely topic of Emergency and Rapid Response, featuring guest speaker Mark Elmore of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Due to local fires and the H1N1 flu outbreak, the original 40 participants were reduced to 23, as participants were pulled away to deal with emergencies and to provide rapid response (rather appropriate given the topic of the workshop). Even so, the workshop and Mark’s presentation were well received. The most recent Partner’s workshop, on February 2, 2010, covered the topic of Digital/Social Media and Gaming, and drew a lively audience of 22. The series is a showcase for FCS faculty; however the real benefit is making connections with local industries that could eventually become partners. The Faculty will continue the series with another workshop in preparation for spring and/or fall of 2010. For more information on upcoming Partners For Success workshops, please contact Rosemary.Bulley@dal.ca or phone 902-494-3446.

In Partnershipwith Industry

GenieKnows Inc is a Halifax based IT company that connects search technology, community and content by developing niche-specific portals tailored for distinct searching communities. GenieKnows works closely with researchers and students at the Faculty of Computer Science, a relationship which began from a MITACS funded project eight years ago. These early beginnings led to the establishment of R&D at GenieKnows and a growing partnership which continues to deliver benefits to all parties involved. Working together on research projects has opened up access to government grant programs, provided valuable opportunities to graduate students and professors and has provided GenieKnows with cost-effective research, helping it to maintain its competitive edge in a rapidly changing market. Since the original MITACS funded joint project, the partnership has benefitted from the NSERC CRD program, the MITACS Accelerate Internship program, the NRC-IRAP program and from ACOA-AIF. Working together has also provided the advantage of exposing graduate students and the company to each other. Many GenieKnows R&D staff are Dalhousie graduates who had worked on internships or co-op placements at the company. Professors at the Faculty of Computer Science have been involved as consultants/advisors and have benefitted from the exposure to real world industrial problems and the inspiration this brings to their own research. Looking to the future the partnership looks set to continue growing. New collaborative projects are being sought and new funding opportunities, such as the NSERC Engage program, are becoming available.

Such a partnership model that provides research funding to both industry and

academia, which is affordable for small business, and which builds

capacity and brings economic benefits to the region is a

win-win-win scenario.

Partners for Success:Showcasing Research Strengths

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”

- Charles Darwin

NSERC’s Strategy for Partnerships and Innovation (SPI) Gives Researchers New Tools to Connect with Industry

Faculty

Contact

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) recently launched a new Strategy for Partnerships and Innovation in December, 2009. A key goal of the Strategy is strengthening the opportunities for collaborative research between universities and Canadian companies. Two new pilot programs give researchers from Canadian universities an opportunity to meet with potential collaborators and work on company-specific problems. The Interaction Grants program provides up to $5,000 over three months to support expenses associated with travel and meetings in order to allow academic researchers to establish contact with one or several companies to identify new potential research projects. Occasionally, travel expenses for University-Industry Liaison Office staff to participate or for representatives of small companies to visit a university may also be eligible. The Engage Grants program supports the development of new collaborations through short-term R&D projects undertaken by eligible university researchers and Canadian private-sector partners. A maximum grant of $25,000, over a period of six months or less, can be awarded to the academic researcher to cover the direct project costs associated with the research activities needed to address an identified industrial problem. Engage Grants are meant to foster the development of a new collaborative relationship between a company and the academic researcher, so there can be no existing or past relationship between the two parties, including a previous research collaboration, consulting contract, or involvement by the academic researcher in the company. University researchers can also pursue research collaborations with the private sector through the NSERC Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) program. CRD Grants support industry-driven R&D projects in which direct costs are cost-shared by the industrial partner(s) and NSERC. These projects can range from one to five years in duration, although most awards are for two or three years. The average grant size is approximately $65,500 with a maximum amount of $500,000 per year. The CRD program enjoys one of the highest NSERC success rates for applicants, with over 85% of project applications being successful. In some cases, CRD Grants can be aligned with companies receiving support from other government R&D programs, such as the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) or the Atlantic Canadian Opportunities Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund (ACOA-AIF), both of which act as catalysts for enhanced private-public sector R&D. Combining efforts through these programs can help companies stretch their R&D budget and maximize their opportunities to innovate.

For more information on NSERC and its programs, please visit our partnership site at www.nsercpartnerships.ca

Michael Shepherd, Dean

Evangelos Milios

Andrew Rau-Chaplin

Peter Bodorik

Abdel-Aziz Farrag

Carolyn R. Watters

Christian Blouin

Denis Riordan

Dirk Arnold

Jacob Slonim

James Blustein

Malcolm Heywood

Michael McAllister

Nauzer Kalyaniwalla

Norbert Zeh

Nur Zincir-Heywood

Norm J Scrimger

Philip T. Cox

Qigang Gao

Raza Abidi

Robert Beiko

Srinivas Sampalli

Stephen Brooks

Thomas Trappenberg

Vlado Keselj

Alex Brodsky

Brad Lushman

Arthur E. Sedgwick

Faculty of Computer ScienceDalhousie University6050 University AvenueHalifax NS B3H 1W5Canada

(phone) 902-494-2093(fax) 902-492-1517inquiries@cs.dal.cawww.cs.dal.ca

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought”

by Jason Frenette, NSERC

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)