Prof. Cheung Nominated for 2020 YWCA Women of Distinction Award!

Professor Karen Cheung.

Biomedical Engineering and ECE Professor Karen Cheung has recently been nominated for the 2020 YWCA Women of Distinction Award, in the Research, the Sciences & Technology Category.

The esteemed award is recognized nationally and honours extraordinary women leaders, while highlighting YWCA programs and services that improve the lives of thousands of people each year across Metro Vancouver.

Karen Cheung’s research areas are in Biomedical Technologies and Emerging Micro/Nano Technologies, and include lab-on-a-chip systems for cell culture and characterization, inkjet printing for tissue engineering, and implantable neural interfaces. She is also a member of both the BioMEMS and Microsystems and Nanotechnology research groups.

Part of the YWCA event involves a Connecting the Community Award, in which the nominee who gets the most votes will get to support $10,000, donated by Scotiabank, to a community program of her choice.

Cheung’s chosen program is Early Learning and Care. “As a biomedical engineering professor, I see firsthand how eager our students are to gain the skills they will use to transform lives in emerging areas of medicine. I choose to support early learning because childhood science and engineering education is essential to give young children the fun, engaging activities that empower them to see themselves as problem solvers,” she says.

The 37th annual YWCA Women of Distinction Award ceremony will be held on May 11, 2020 at the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver. Leading up to this event, we ask you to support Karen Cheung’s nomination in her campaign for the Connecting the Community Award. Voters can vote once per day from March 4 to April 24, 2020.

Dr. Jim McEwen, UBC ECE graduate, has kindly offered to sponsor a table for UBC’s Biomedical Engineering Student Team (BEST) members at the upcoming award ceremony if voting is successful. This is an exciting opportunity to celebrate and support incredible women in engineering, while making a positive impact right here in Vancouver.

BC Hydro/Powertech Invited Lectures

Lecture 2: “BC Hydro’s Future Grid Modernization”

March 4 | 12:00 – 2:00 pm | KAISER 2020/2030

This is the second lecture of BC Hydro/Powertech’s series of presentations for 2020. This presentation will describe the plans of BC Hydro to modernize its grid in the next years. This is a one-hour presentation with an extra half an hour for networking with BC Hydro engineers.

ABSTRACT

Mr. Papadoulis current role is to lead the Future Grid and Modernization Team of BC Hydro to prepare a Roadmap to plot out the future power system and to align with and operationalize CleanBC as well as the Phase 2 of the BC Government Review. The theme of the Strategy and Roadmap is to ensure that BC Hydro is ready for all that the future brings, and to learn to quickly adapt to the changing climate, the evolving energy industry, and the needs of its customers. In addition to the technical work, we must propel the boundaries on policy, regulation, influence legislation, and recognize we may have to do things differently in the future. Along with looking into the future, the Future Grid and Modernization Team performs Asset Management functions for Revenue Metering, Electric Vehicle Charging, and Automation which are vital components of the Strategy and Roadmap.

Biography

Jim Papadoulis received a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from The University of British Columbia in 1992. He has been in industry for 27 years (18 with BC Hydro). He is a Registered Professional Engineer in BC since 1996. He has a Certificate as a Project Management Professional from the Project Management Institute, 2006, and a Certificate in Asset Management from the Institute of Asset Management, 2019. His current title at BC Hydro is Manager, Future Grid & Modernization.

Professor Wei Yu Inaugural Speaker Ian F. Blake Lectureship

ECE is pleased to announce two talks by Prof. Wei Yu, the inaugural speaker for the Ian F. Blake Lectureship, on Friday February 21, 2020.

The Ian F. Blake Lectureship was established in July 2019 with a gift made to UBC by Dr. Vijay Bhargava. This series of lectures honours the work of Ian F. Blake, a Canadian pioneer in the field of Information and Communications Theory and Honorary Professor in ECE.

Talk 1: Spatial Deep Learning for Wireless Scheduling

February 21, 11 am, Kaiser 2020

What is the role of machine learning in the design and optimization of communication systems? In this talk, we examine the well-known challenging problem of optimal scheduling of interfering links in a dense wireless network, and point out that the traditional optimization approach of first estimating all the interfering channel strengths then optimizing the scheduling based on the model may not always the best. This is because channel estimation is resource intensive, especially in a dense network. To address this issue, we investigate the possibility of using a deep learning approach to bypass channel estimation and to schedule links efficiently based solely on the geographic locations of transmitters and receivers. This can be accomplished either by supervised learning using locally optimal schedules generated from fractional programming for randomly deployed device-to-device networks as training data, or by unsupervised learning. In both cases, we use a novel neural network architecture that takes the geographic spatial convolutions of the interfering or interfered neighboring nodes as input over multiple feedback stages to learn the optimum solution. The resulting neural network gives excellent performance for sum-rate maximization and is capable of generalizing to larger deployment areas and to deployments of different link densities. Further, we propose a novel approach of utilizing the sum-rate optimal scheduling heuristics over judiciously chosen subsets of links to provide fair scheduling across the network, thereby showing the promise of using deep learning to solve discrete optimization problems in wireless networking. (Joint work with Wei Cui and Kaiming Shen)

Talk 2: Perfect Hashing, Hypergraph Covering, Identification Capacity, and Collision-Free Feedback for Massive Random Access

February 21, 3 pm, Kaiser 2020

Designing multiple-access protocols capable of supporting massive but sporadic machine-type communications is a key requirement for the future integration of wireless cellular communication systems with Internet-of-Things. In this talk, we consider a massive random access network in which a small random subset of K active users, out of a large number of N total potential users, seek to communicate with a base station. We examine an approach in which the base station first determines the user activities based on an uplink pilot phase, then broadcasts a common feedback message to all the active users for the scheduling of their subsequent data transmissions. Our main question is: What is the minimum amount of common feedback needed to schedule K users in K transmission slots while completely avoiding collisions? Instead of a naive scheme of using K log(N) feedback bits, this talk presents upper and lower bounds to show that the minimum number of required common feedback bits scales linearly in K, plus an additive term that scales only as O(log log(N)). The solution to this problem is closely related to that of constructing a minimal family of perfect hash functions and also that of constructing a minimal covering of a complete hypergraph. The solution has a curious resemblance to the notion of identification capacity. (Joint work with Justin Kang)

Biography

Wei Yu received the B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto since 2002, where he is now Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Information Theory and Wireless Communications. Prof. Wei Yu currently serves as a Vice President of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and has served on its Board of Governors since 2015. He was an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2015-16), an Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2017-20), and chaired the Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2017-18). He received the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2019, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2019, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2017 and 2008, the Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award in 2017, an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2015, and an IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2015. Prof. Wei Yu is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

ECE Professor elected to US National Academy of Engineering

Rabab Ward, a professor emeritus in UBC’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected a Foreign Member of the United States’ National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for her “innovative applications of signal processing to industrial and bioengineering problems.”

One of the highest professional honours an engineer can receive, election to the NAE recognizes those who have made identifiable contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education” or to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

It is a yearlong process that culminates in all present members of the academy voting on a final list of nominees in January.

The first female engineering professor in British Columbia, Ward has authored eight patents and over 500 refereed research papers and conference articles in fields such as signal detection and image encoding, recognition and restoration. Her work has led to advancements in cable and high-definition television, medical imaging, brain computer interfaces and other areas.

Ward was the first woman to receive the R.A. Machlachlan Award, the highest award of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC, and is the only woman to receive the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Norbert Wiener Society Award. Among her numerous other awards are the UBC Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring and UBC Applied Science’s Centennial Gold Medal.

A past president and member of the board of governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Ward is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

This year, the NAE elected 87 new members and 18 new international members. The 2020 class of elected members will be formally inducted into the academy during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, DC, on October 4.

Professor Ali Mesbah receives 2019 UBC Killam Research Prize

ECE Professor Dr. Ali Mesbah received the 2019 UBC Killam Research Prize in the Junior Category, which recognizes outstanding research and scholarly contributions.

Dr. Mesbah was nominated for his impressive research record, and significant impact on software testing and the analysis of modern software systems. His work has been recognized through five Distinguished and Best Paper Awards.

Software errors cost the global economy billions of dollars per year and software developers spend around half of their programming time finding and fixing software-related failures. Professor Mesbah has been at the forefront of research in creating novel techniques for automatically analyzing and testing complex software programs to improve their dependability. He has also made significant contributions in areas of test adequacy assessment, software bug pattern discovery, fault localization, and automated repair of buggy software programs.

For more details on Dr. Mesbah’s research, please visit his website

Hey Google, are my housemates using my smart speaker?

UBC ECE research shows more needs to be done to alleviate user concerns about privacy and security

Surveys show that consumers are worried that smart speakers are eavesdropping on their conversations and day-to-day lives. Now University of British Columbia researchers have found that people are also concerned about something else: friends, family and others who may have access to these devices.

The team spoke to 26 Canadian adults who used shared smart speakers at home, including Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod. They found that participants not only worried about keeping their data safe from the manufacturer or other entities; they also feared potential misuse of the device by people they actually live with and know.

“They worried that their housemates could order stuff online, overhear private conversations or access other people’s reminders, calendars and phone contacts,” explained senior author of the study Konstantin Beznosov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in cybersecurity at UBC. “Of course, they were aware these actions could well be unintentional — such as a child accidentally using the last-number-dialled feature to call up their parent’s employer, for example.”

Interestingly, the nature of the concern depended on the participant’s “mental model” or technical understanding of how smart speakers work, notes study primary author Yue Huang, a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering.

“Participants who were very familiar with shared smart speakers were more worried about how technology shortcomings could affect the security of their devices,” said Huang. “An example is a smart speaker that occasionally fails to distinguish the main user’s voice from another, which means it could grant people access to information they shouldn’t have.”

However, users with more basic knowledge of how smart speakers work were more focused on their housemates’ potential actions, and this sometimes meant seeing a threat where there was none.

“One participant who worried his family member could redial a number was unaware the feature was not even available on the device,” said Huang, noting that the study is the first to explore these mental models about shared smart speakers and link these models to attitudes.

These results suggest more work is needed to improve consumers’ understanding of shared smart speakers and to make the technology more reliable, adds Beznosov.

“One in four U.S. adults and one in five Canadians say they own a smart speaker. People like being able to stream music, obtain weather forecasts, control other smart devices and get the news with simple voice commands. But since smart speakers are commonly shared among housemates, technology developers should take into account these consumer concerns. And manufacturers should provide more technical support to help users manage their risks.”

The study will be presented in April at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Honolulu.

Photo by BENCE BOROS on Unsplash

James McEwen Inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame

James McEwen, a UBC alumnus and adjunct professor in UBC’s Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Medicine, has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) for his invention of the automatic surgical tourniquet, a medical device that has significantly improved surgical safety, quality and efficiency around the world.

Tourniquets are used to limit arterial blood flow, reducing blood loss and allowing surgeons to work in a blood-free environment. But before McEwen developed his innovation in the late 1970s, tourniquets were unreliable and even dangerous to use, often causing nerve or tissue damage by applying prolonged excessive pressure to the limb or extremity.

“I suspected that with a little ingenuity, I could create a new microprocessor-based tourniquet system that could completely get around all of the problems with mechanical tourniquets,” said McEwen in a convocation address at Simon Fraser University. “Of course, luck played a big role […] I was born in the year that the transistor was invented, I graduated from electrical engineering in the year the microprocessor was invented and I got my Ph.D. in the year that the first microcomputer was introduced.”

McEwen’s tourniquet, which uses a computer to ensure that the device applies only the minimum pressure necessary to stop blood flow, was far safer and more accurate than models available at the time and is now standard equipment in most operating rooms in Western countries. He began developing the technology after learning that a young patient at Vancouver General Hospital had become paralyzed in the arm due to a tourniquet-related accident during routine surgery.

“[Mechanical tourniquets] caused injuries. And the injuries could be quite serious. Everyone accepted that. But I didn’t,” said McEwen, who has over 240 patents and patent applications for medical devices and has long supported educational programs, scholarships and other initiatives to advance innovation, including at UBC. “My intuition and education told me I could create something better.”

Other 2020 NIHF inductees include the inventors of the sports bra and an autonomous robot system that has revolutionized warehouse order fulfillment for e-commerce.

After receiving his bachelor’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in electrical engineering from UBC, McEwen established the biomedical engineering department at Vancouver General Hospital, serving as its director from 1975 until 1990. He founded the tourniquet technology company Delfi Medical Innovations Inc., co-founded the not-for-profit Medical Device Development Centre, which facilitates the development and evaluation of new medical technologies, and is currently president of Western Clinical Engineering Ltd., a part of the Delfi Medical group.

McEwen is also an Officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of numerous honours, among them the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, honourary doctorates from SFU and UBC, the Meritorious Achievement Award from the Association of Professional Engineers of British Columbia, the Dean’s Medal of Distinction from UBC Applied Science and the $100,000 Principal Award for Innovation in Canada from the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation.

The NIHF aims “to recognize inventors and invention, promote creativity and advance the spirit of innovation” by connecting its inductees with budding inventors through STEM education programs, interactive exhibits and other means.

The 48th Induction Ceremony will be held on May 7, 2020 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. For more information about McEwen’s inventions and accomplishments, please see his official page on the National Inventors Hall of Fame website.

ECE & Faculty of Medicine Profs to Partner in Supercluster’s Projects

Dr. Purang Abolmaesumi (ECE), Dr. Robert Rohling (ECE), Dr. Teresa Tsang (Faculty of Medicine), and Dr. Lukas Chrostowski (ECE).

On January 16, 2020 the Digital Technology Supercluster announced 14 new projects with a total investment of $25 million; eight focused on talent development for the digital economy, six in technology.

The Supercluster aims to position Canada as a global leader in digital technologies by bringing together small, medium-sized and large companies, post-secondary institutions, research organizations and not-for-profits. The Supercluster co-invests in ambitious technology development projects and new solutions to improve the sustainability and competitiveness of natural resources, healthcare and industrial sectors and energize the economy. The projects announced today will help create good jobs, drive economic growth, and elevate the reputation of Canada’s world-leading digital economy.

ECE Professors are partnering in the following technology and capacity building projects:

Intelligent Network for Point-of-Care Ultrasound (Technology Project)

Dr. Purang Abolmaesumi (UBC ECE Professor), Dr. Robert Rohling (UBC ECE Professor) and Dr. Teresa Tsang (UBC Cardiologist and Professor of Medicine) are partnering with the Intelligent Network for Point-of-Care Ultrasound project. The project is led by the Providence Health Care together with Clarius Mobile Health, Change Healthcare, and Rural Coordination Centre of BC as other partners.

The project will develop a bedside tool for doctors that combines machine learning, handheld ultrasound devices and a cloud-based platform to create an integrated and intelligent point-of-care ultrasound network to deliver faster, more accurate diagnoses to patients whether they reside in urban, rural or remote areas.

The intelligent network being built will provide visual feedback to family doctors and reduce the need for specialized training. The visual feedback will provide augmented assistance to the physician to make a diagnosis decision no matter where they are. The connected system will also load images centrally, making remote second opinions an easy option.

The project will initially target heart and pregnancy applications, and testing will begin where it can have the most impact on the lives of patients–with rural physicians. The Intelligent Network for Point-of-Care Ultrasound will help Canada lead the development of integrated, point-of-care diagnostics while improving healthcare delivery and outcomes for Canadians. 

Learn more about the project

Diversifying Talent in Quantum Computing (Capacity Building Project)

ECE Professor Dr. Lukas Chrostowski is co-leading the Diversifying Talent in Quantum Computingproject together with other partners. The 24-month project will work to ensure that young people are aware of the career opportunities presented by this revolutionary technology.

Led by the University of British Columbia (UBC), along with D-Wave, and UBC Geering Up Engineering Outreach, the program will deliver ready-to-use education kits and curriculum targeting K-12 students; workshops, summer camps, and public forums, including specialized programming for girls and Indigenous students; and teacher training through an online quantum computing resource hub and a bi-weekly “Quantum bits” podcast that will host well-known international academics and industry experts.

The computing kits and curriculum tools will include software that interfaces to the D-Wave quantum processor. The kit will include a teacher’s guide to the concept of quantum computing and its applications, and a basic handbook to enable students to create their own software experiments. All materials will be developed using evidence-based best practices, with content designed for a diverse audience. With Indigenous people underrepresented in STEM careers, the project will also work with Indigenous education leaders to deliver proactive community-based outreach to one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

Learn more about the project

Digital Technology Supercluster Press Release

Karthik Pattabiraman Awarded Most Influential Paper at ISSRE

ECE Professor Karthik Pattabiraman (second from the right) and his MASc student and co-author Xin Chen (far right)

Last month, the 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2019), held in Berlin, Germany announced that ECE Professor Karthik Pattabiraman’s paper was chosen as one of the most influential papers in the conference’s 30-year history, where only 26 out of over 1000 papers were selected. ISSRE is considered the top conference in the software reliability area. The paper, titled “Failure analysis of jobs in compute clouds: A Google cluster case study” was first published at the ISSRE in 2014 and was written by Pattabiraman, his MSc student Xin Chen at UBC, as well as Charng-da Lu, a research collaborator in the US.

The paper analyzes the reliability of a real data center at Google based on job scheduling traces – this was based on a publicly released dataset (by Google) consisting of 1 month of job scheduling data for one of their datacenters. This was one of the few publicly available papers featuring failure data from real data-centers. It was the first to analyze this dataset for application failures, and analyze their root causes.

There are three main research findings: (1) Many of the failures observed were due to a small percentage of the jobs, and these consumed significant resources, (2) Simple measures such as periodic restarts and terminating jobs that are resubmitted too often can mitigate many of the failures, and (3) it is possible to predict whether a job will complete successfully even half-way into its execution based on its resource consumption patterns.

Cloud data center operators can use these results to mitigate job failures and save energy. They can also take remedial measures to improve the reliability of the overall data center, and to take preventive actions before the failure. Together, the findings can lead to more reliable and energy-efficient cloud data centers.

The importance of the findings is twofold. As cloud computing becomes more and more prominent, the reliability of jobs running on the cloud is increasingly important. Many critical applications such as banking and healthcare are being hosted on the cloud, and hence it is vital to ensure high-availability of the cloud. Second, cloud data centers consume a significant amount of energy (and they are rapidly growing), and hence it is important to avoid energy wastage due to running jobs that are ultimately going to fail (and terminating them early).

The new element is that Pattabiraman and his team are the first study to consider failures of cloud applications (i.e., jobs) at scale in a real-world, production data center. Previous studies either considered small scale deployments and hence could not observe failures that only manifest at large scale, or consider only hardware failures of individual nodes, without considering the applications running in the cloud, and hence do not observe the software manifestations of the failures.

Download the paper.

Learn more about the ISSRE conference.

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About Karthik Pattabiraman

Karthik Pattabiraman is an Associate Professor within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UBC. His research interests are in dependable and secure computer systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and has won multiple awards for his research such as the Killam Faculty Research Prize, and the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement award.

Research Feature: VocalTube

The VocalTube project, led by graduate student Debasish Ray Mohapatra, talks about how speech is an essential mechanism for communication and expressing emotions — the words that we pronounce and the nature of expression while speaking define our individuality. Hence, two people never sound similar, even though they speak the same word in the same language. It has been a long fascination in the science community to understand — “how does human produce sound?” and “how could we make machines speak like a human?”. It is clear that we have come a long way from modelling formant speech synthesizers to state-of-the-art powerful machine learning models. However, we are still far away from designing a physics-based articulatory speech synthesizer that could generate speech sound in real-time. Mohapatra’s current published paper, which was shown at the 2019 Interspeech Conference, held in Graz, Austria, addresses this research problem. Currently, he is trying to build

a speaker-specific vocal tract model (2.5D FDTD vocal tract) using the finite difference method that could produce static vowel sounds in quasi-real-time.

Speech production is a complex activity. But in terms of functionality, it is the same as a wind instrument — we blow air through the reed (mouthpiece), which is the VocalTube source of acoustic energy, and those acoustic waves pass through a resonator to produce sound. As we change the geometry of the resonator (duct), the musical sound will vary. In speech anatomy, the non-periodic vibration of vocal folds works as the source and the upper vocal tract as the resonator or articulator. As the articulation (geometry of vocal tract) differs for each individual, we sound very differently while speaking.

But the vocal tract has a very intricate and complex geometry. To capture its irregularity, we need to build a 3D model. That could provide us with better acoustic characteristics, but it’s computationally expensive. Similarly, the existing 1D models provide faster simulation but an oversimplified representation of the realistic vocal tract. We have come across a novel approach for modelling a 2D vocal tract having 3D characteristics using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) numerical method. This new strategy will give us a way to design a real-time speech synthesizer without compromising its acoustic features. And this computational model uses the vocal tract area functions, collected through MRI, while the speaker making vowels and consonants sounds.

Our next goal is to understand the nonlinear coupling between the vocal fold and vocal tract for designing a complete articulatory speech synthesizer, as this research could also be implemented in singing synthesizers and aero-acoustic modelling of wind instruments. Check out the paper and source code below for more information.

Paper Link: https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2019/pdfs/1764.pdf
Source Code: https://github.com/Debasishray19/vocaltube-speech-synthesis/tree/master/version03