An NSERC-funded UBC Electrical & Computer Engineering research team led by Dr. John Madden has developed a novel sensor that could facilitate the design of advanced devices like foldable tablets.
The sensor is comprised of a conductive gel enveloped in layers of silicone that are able to detect swiping, tapping, and many other kinds of touch even when it is folded. This is a huge breakthrough, as most other devices are only able to detect one kind of touch (such as pressure). It is small (5 cm x 5 cm) and inexpensive to construct.
Seven ECE graduate students competed in this year’s heat for the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Presenters were given three minutes to explain their research in a way that even non-experts will understand. Judges evaluated presenters on clarity and comprehension, audience engagement, and communication style.
PhD student Yazan Boshmaf was selected to speak as an Early Career Researcher at the Humboldt Colloquium. Yazan’s presentation, titled “Security Analysis of Social Bots on the Web”, discussed his research in social network security. A collaboration with Ildar Musulkhov, Dr. Ripeanu and Dr. Beznosov, this work evaluates how vulnerable online social networks are to infiltration by socialbots, computer programs that control OSN accounts and mimic real users.
PhD Candidate Hamidreza Boostanimehr and ECE Professor Vijay K. Bhargava are recipients of the Best Paper Award from the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications held in Beijing, China from August 15-17. Their paper, entitled, "Outage Analysis and Relay Allocation for Multi-stream OFDM Decode-and-Forward Rayleigh Fading Networks", examines the outage behaviour of cooperative systems. Their study enables the authors to analyze the outage performance more reliably.
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Tanaya Guha is a PhD student specializing in artificial intelligence. Her research focuses on automatic understanding of human activities in videos, which has significant real-world applications in surveillance, medicine, sports and entertainment.
"As an engineer, I am passionate about designing practical systems that can improve human lives."