RESEARCH FEST 2016

Research & Innovation in Computer Science & Bioinformatics

October 06, 2016
2:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Spinks Addition Building, University of Saskatchewan

Computer Science Graduate Course Council (CSGCC)
&
Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Research Fest 2016 has been organized by the Computer Science Graduate Course Council (CSGCC) partnered with the Department of Computer Science celebrating research done by graduate students. Our goal is to bring together graduate students, faculty members, researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss and present the research and innovations in different areas of Computer Science and Bioinformatics. Research Fest 2016 invites high quality contributions describing significant, original, published and/or unpublished results. Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:

Computer Systems, Networks and Performance
Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics
Distributed and Parallel Computing
Human-Computer Interaction
Imaging, Multimedia and Graphics
Intelligent Systems
Multi-User Adaptive Distributed Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
Simulation and Modeling
Software Engineering
Accessible Computing
Bioinformatics
Biomedical and Interactive Graphics

KEY DATES

Abstract submission:	September 01, 2016
Author notification for abstract:	September 15, 2016
Final poster and revised abstract submission:	October 01, 2016
Poster presentation, banquet and award ceremony:	October 06, 2016

SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT & POSTER

Those interested in participating should send an abstract to graduate.council@cs.usask.ca. The abstract should highlight your research problem, methodology and experimental findings in at most 300 words. Once the abstract is accepted by the review panel, you can submit the poster through Moodle. If you do not have access to Moodle, please contact CSGCC electronically.

We highly recommend that you have your poster printed before Oct. 6.

Location: 3rd Floor Spinks Addition Building

Times:
1:30pm - Presenters set up their posters
2:00pm-4:00pm - Poster presentations
4:00pm-4:30pm - Judges decide best poster presentations and award announcement.

AWARDS

Three best posters will be awarded based on the evaluation of the judges, and another poster will be awarded based on the votes of the attendees at the event.

Best Poster: $400 (Sponsored by Colledge of Graduate Study and Research, University of Saskatchewan)
First Runner-up Poster: $300 (Sponsored by Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan)
Second Runner-up Poster: $200 (Sponsored by Computer Science Department, University of Saskatchewan)
People's Choice Poster: $100 (Sponsored by Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), University of Saskatchewan)

We would like to thank all the students, judges, faculty, and staff who participated in or attended Research Fest 2016. The quality of work presented was very impressive and it is our pleasure to announce the Best Poster Awards for the event.

The results of the poster awards are as follows:
1st place: Ansgar Depping, Colby Johanson, Regan Mandryk with the poster titled "Trust Me: Social Games are Better Social Icebreakers at Building Trust."
2nd place: Rahat Yasir, Mark Eramian with the poster titled "A Skin Disease Detection System for Financially Unstable People in Developing Countries."
3rd place: Conor Lazarou, Tony Kusalik, Mike Horsch with the poster titled "Overcoming the Curse of Dimensionality in Soil Microbiome Modelling Using Fuzzy Logic and Bayesian Soft-Cluster Assignment."
People's choice award: Marina Schmidt, Ray Spiteri with the poster titled "Designing error control circuits for 4-qubit quantum computing."

LEAD ORGANIZER

Farhad Maleki

Farhad Maleki is a Ph.D student in Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. He has been president of the CSGCC for one year. His research interests include various topics in computational biology such as applying machine learn and statistical data analysis to gain insight from biological data. He has also worked on methodology and application of evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.

COMMITTEE

	Eric Neufeld Eric Neufield, Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan. After completing his B.Sc., He has worked with Charles Colbourn, studying uniformly sparse graphs. He then investigated aspects of nonmonotonic reasoning with David Poole and Romas Aleliunas, in a then-new area known as 'uncertainty in AI', including the subarea of causality. He has also always had an interest in computer graphics, and pursued several visualization projects. During the heydey of the iPhone and iPad, He became interested in mobile computing, and was able to combine all three interests in a piece of software called iCausalBayes.
	Julita Vassileva Julita Vassileva, Professor and Graduate Chair, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan. Julita Vassileva's research interests are Personalization, User Modeling, Recommender Systems, Interactive Visualizations; Social Computing, Incentive Mechanisms for Participation, Persuasive Technologies; Social Personalized Learning Environments, Peer-help, Learning Communities; Decentralized Social Architectures, Peer-to-Peer and Multi-Agent Systems; Trust and Privacy, Trust and Reputation Mechanisms.
	Anthony J. Kusalik B.Sc.(Lethbridge), M.Sc., Ph.D. (BC) Dr. Kusalik's research interests range from logic programming to operating systems to computational biology. However, his primary research interests center around bioinformatics, especially immuno-informatics.
	Jesse Redl Jesse is the evangelizing voice of good development processes and agile practices throughout Vendasta. A relentless problem-solver and passionate thought-leader, he is responsible for the execution of the company’s product vision and ensuring the quality of our platform upholds the highest standards. His technical prowess comes from years of experience as both a software developer and business analyst—most recently as a product manager at Point2 Technologies—and now he directs his energy toward assisting scrum masters in the creation of high performing product delivery teams and collaborating with the chief architect on Vendasta's technical vision. In other words, the teams’ success is his success, leading him to help everyone in the company broaden their knowledge and maximize their professional potential.
	Chris Dagenais Chris Dagenais is the Director of Software Development at the Saskatoon office of Yardi. He’s been working on teams building enterprise web applications for 16 years in various fields ranging from residential real estate marketing to energy management solutions. As a primary focus Chris is concerned with building healthy team cultures where people can do great work solving important problems in a positive and supportive atmosphere. Many of the software developers on Chris’ teams have Computer Science degrees from the U of S and he expects to see that trend continue.
	George Biswas George has been with ESTI for over six years, working in software development, team leadership and technical leadership roles. At ESTI, he works extensively with various J2EE frameworks, the WebLogic application server, Oracle and ForgeRock identity management systems, and Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server databases. George has worked on the development of various systems including data management, payroll remittance, accounting, financial payment systems and REST and SOAP based web services. His project experience includes development and maintenance of many custom systems, database migrations, operating system platform migrations, system configurations, application deployment planning and execution. George has a keen interest in cutting edge technologies and tries to incorporate these technologies into projects with the goal of increasing performance and efficiency while ensuring stability and maintainability. Aside from technology, George is also interested in travel and global politics
	Jeff Long Dr. Jeff Long earned his B. Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan in 2003 and his M. Sc. From the University of Saskatchewan in 2006. In 2011, he earned his Ph. D. from the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Michael Buro. His primary interest is in artificial intelligence techniques for playing challenging games, especially games of imperfect information. He currently works for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan in a teaching and administrative position.
	Mike Sheinin Mike graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 2015 with a M.Sc. in Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Carl Gutwin where he won the Best Graduate Student Award. His work involving Small-Scale Exertion in Sports Video Games led him to create a computer game, called Jelly Polo, which won a number of high-level awards and competitions, including best game awards from international conferences in Toronto and South Korea. He also worked in the area of Colour Vision Deficiency where he and Dr. David Flatla built the first ever personalized real-time simulation of how a person sees colour. Since graduating, Mike has become an Applications Engineer at Solido, which is an Electronic Design Automation company helping integrated circuit designers, from multi-billion dollar companies like Apple, with their statistical variation analyses.