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

Prof L. Chrostowski Elected to Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists

UBC Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Lukas Chrostowski has been named a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, Canada’s “first national system of multidisciplinary recognition for the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leadership.”

Recognized by the Royal Society of Canada for “his leadership in research and education in the design of silicon photonic devices and systems for applications in optical communications and biosensors,”

Chrostowski, who has taught silicon photonics workshops and courses since 2008, currently directs the NSERC-funded Silicon Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits training program for undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows across Canada. Chrostowski holds a BEng in electrical engineering from McGill University and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Co-director of the UBC AMPEL Nanofabrication Facility from 2008 to 2017, he is the recipient of a Killam Teaching Prize, has served as an elected member of the Board of Governors and as the Associate Vice President of Education at the IEEE Photonics Society, and co-authored the book Silicon Photonics Design, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.

Established as an entity of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014, the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists identifies and brings together mid-career scholars, artists and scientists who have achieved excellence in their disciplines. It also aims to advance understanding and improve society by promoting “the interaction of diverse intellectual, cultural and social perspectives.”

Chrostowski and the other new members of the College will be inducted this November, during the Royal Society of Canada’s Celebration of Excellence and Engagement in Ottawa.

Chrostowski’s full citation from the Royal Society of Canada reads as follows: Lukas Chrostowski, a Principal Investigator of the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (UBC), is recognized for his leadership in research and education in the design of silicon photonic devices and systems for applications in optical communications and biosensors. His present work is focused on developing new photonics-based information processing circuits: neuromorphic processors, quantum communication, and quantum computers.

For more information about the Royal Society of Canada, the newly elected Fellows and the incoming class of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, please see the UBC announcement and the Royal Society of Canada’s release.

UBC Researchers Find Ways to Hackproof Smart Meters

For the original UBC News media release, please visit: https://news.ubc.ca/2019/06/06/ubc-researchers-find-ways-to-hackproof-smart-meters/

Smart electricity meters are useful because they allow energy utilities to efficiently track energy use and allocate energy production. But because they’re connected to a grid, they can also serve as back doors for malicious hackers. In this Q&A, cybersecurity researcher Karthik Pattabiraman, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UBC, talks about his recent breakthrough aimed at improving the security of these devices and boosting security in the smart grid.

Why is it so important to secure smart meters?

Smart meters are critical components of the smart grid, sometimes called the Internet of Things, with more than 588 million units projected to be installed worldwide by 2022.

In a single household you can have multiple smart devices connected to electricity through a smart meter. If someone took over that meter, they could deactivate your alarm system, see how much energy you’re using, or rack up your bill. In 2009, to cite one real-life example, a massive hack of smart meters in Puerto Rico led to widespread power thefts and numerous fraudulent bills.

Hacked meters can even cause house fires and explosions or even a widespread blackout. Unlike remote servers, smart meters can be relatively easily accessed by attackers, so each smart meter must be quite hackproof and resilient in the field.

How did you approach this problem?

Smart meters are vulnerable to what we call software-interference attacks, where the attacker physically accesses the meter and modifies its communication interfaces or reboots it. As a result, the meter is unable to send data to the grid, or it keeps sending data when it shouldn’t or performs other actions it wouldn’t normally do.

My PhD student and I developed an automated program that uses two detection methods for these types of attacks. First, we created a virtual model of the smart meter and represented how attacks can be carried out against it. This is what we call design-level analysis. Second, we performed code-level analysis. That means probing the smart meter’s code for vulnerabilities, launching a variety of attacks on these vulnerabilities.

Although both techniques successfully discovered attacks against the system, code-level analysis was both more efficient and more accurate than design-level analysis. Code-level analysis found nine different types of attacks within an hour, while design-level analysis found only three.

All of the attacks can be carried out by an attacker with relatively low cost-equipment purchased for less than $50 online, and do not require specialized expertise.

How do your findings improve smart meter security?

Vendors can use the findings to test their designs before they are manufactured, so they can build in security from the get-go. This can make smart meters much harder to crack. By using both approaches—design-level and code-level—you can guard against software tampering on two different fronts.

Our findings can be applied to other kinds of devices connected to a smart grid as well, and that’s important because our homes and offices are increasingly more interconnected through our devices.

Like all security techniques, there is no such thing as 100 per cent protection. Security is a cat-and-mouse game between the attacker and the defender, and our goal is to make it more difficult to launch the attacks. I believe the fact that our techniques were able to find not just one or two vulnerabilities, but a whole series of them, makes them a great starting point for defending against attacks.

The next generation of bionic devices

THE NEXT GENERATION OF BIONIC DEVICES

Inspired by the iconic scene of Luke Skywalker receiving an artificial hand in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, UBC is focusing on the future of bionics and the next generation of bio-integrated devices. Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Dr. John Madden, the newly-formed Bionics Network connects over two dozen principal investigators at UBC, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, working in areas such as advanced prosthetics, rehabilitation robotics, regenerative medicine and 3D printed electronics. With specialties ranging across science, engineering and medicine, what brings these investigators together is a desire to deliver on the promise of bionics: the restoration or enhancement of human capabilities.

[Bionic: using artificial materials and methods to produce activity or movement in a person or animal]

BIONICS HEATING UP

2016 was a watershed year for bionics. July saw the foundation of Elon Musk’s new company, Neuralink, which coincided with the launch of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ’s new Neural Engineering System Design program, both aiming to develop implantable neural interfaces. In October, the world’s first Bionics Cybathlon was hosted in Switzerland, with all the latest prosthetic technology on display. And climactically, in December, after nearly eight years of development, DARPA launched commercialization of its long-awaited, and optimistically-named, LUKE Arm. LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution) represents the cutting-edge of commercial prosthetics: controlled by wireless sensors attached to a patient’s feet, the artificial limb has an anthropomorphic design and natural weight (around eight pounds), 18 degrees of freedom and a responsiveness of one to two seconds using electrical actuators.

Watching the LUKE Arm in motion is an inspiration to many. As one recipient, retired US Army Captain Artie McAuley, put it, “I’m getting to do a lot of things…I never thought I could. This has given me the opportunity to enrich my life.” And more changes are on the horizon. Brain-controlled neuroprosthetics are passing lab tests with flying colours, helping patients with locked-in syndrome to move objects using only their thoughts. Osseo-integration is also gaining traction, which provides more natural and greater control by attaching a prosthetic device directly to the patient’s bone. With this recent wave of new technologies, it may be tempting to believe we’re tantalizingly close to the spectacle of science fiction. But, as Madden puts it, “We’re still a long way from the technological superheroes we see on-screen.”

CHALLENGES TO OVERCOME

This year marks 25 years since the world’s first electrical limb, the Edinburgh Modular Arm System, was unveiled by David Gow. In that time, major advances have seen the production of softer, lighter, stronger and more life-like artificial limbs, leading to the LUKE Arm. However, the challenge of translating lab technology into better patient care is still as great as ever. Studies show that despite these major advances, up to 56 per cent of patients abandon the most cutting-edge electrical devices, opting instead to use simple mechanical systems, which they feel are more reliable and less complicated.

The complexity of the human arm and the challenge it represents is a true marvel. Not only does it have great agility, with 34 degrees of freedom (27 in the hand, seven in the arm) and the ability to manipulate a wide range of differently-shaped objects, but it also has fast twitch response (hundreds of milliseconds) and an average grip strength of around 100 pounds. In addition, the human hand contains over 17,000 nerves capable of detecting weight, firmness, shape, temperature and texture, feeding this information back to the brain via a two-way signalling network. And, if that wasn’t enough, the whole system is wrapped in a soft exterior suitable for human-to-human interaction.

HOW CAN BIONICS DELIVER ON ITS PROMISE?

The LUKE Arm would be indistinguishable from magic 50 years ago and it stands as a testament to how far we’ve come from Götz von Berlichingen’s sixteenth century mechanical hand. But there is much ground to cover in bringing artificial devices to life. “Translating our technologies into better patient care is the goal of the Bionics Network” says Madden. “This means working across boundaries to integrate teams and develop a new generation of devices that are softer, smarter and more sensitive.” For the Bionics Network, this will involve three key research themes: 3D printing to produce custom-fitted parts and reduce costs; soft robotics to exchange rigid components for softer, smarter materials; and bio-integration, to create devices that are compatible with the human body. Madden’s team at the Molecular Mechatronics Lab recently hit the headlines with the development of a soft artificial skin that can impart touch sensation to robots.*

At a time when bionics is more popular than ever, the Bionics Network is developing a network of scientists, engineers and clinicians to be at the forefront of this new generation of devices. By combining human biology, biomimetic design and the perspective of the patient, the group aims to deliver mobility, freedom and life back to many.

Bionics Network is supported by UBC’s Vice President of Research and Innovation Office, in collaboration with the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (ICICS).

Original article on UBC Applied Science

Work with a Purpose: AbCellera Hires Talented People who want to make a Difference

Article by Michael Smith Labs Communications Team

You might already hold the cure for flu or dementia. How? Your body makes billions of unique antibodies and one of these could be the basis for a treatment. But, how do you find that one rare therapeutic antibody buried in the proverbial haystack?

AbCellera, a local biotechnology company founded at the University of British Columbia (UBC), has developed a new method that can search immune responses more deeply than any other technology. Using a microfluidic technology developed at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories, advanced immunology, protein chemistry, performance computing, and machine learning, AbCellera is changing the game for antibody therapeutics.

In 2012, AbCellera started with only six members. The company has grown to over 75 employees who contribute expertise in diverse fields such as computational and data science, cell biology, protein chemistry, and biophysical engineering. This interdisciplinary team is crucial to the discovery of each antibody screened at AbCellera.

Protein scientists prepare the production of antigens to screen for antibodies with the right binding properties. These antibodies are selected from millions of antibody-producing cells using microfluidics, biochemical assays, robotics, and machine learning. Afterwards, next-generation sequencing is used to read the genes that code for the antibodies. Making sense of the huge datasets that are produced from millions of cells requires high-speed computation, bioinformatics, and some next-level visualization of the resulting datasets. Out of millions of sequences, only a couple dozen of the best will be expressed and evaluated for their ability to become a viable treatment.

From start to finish, the process of antibody discovery can be done in five days, compared to the three months required for conventional techniques. This technology could drastically speed up the drug discovery process for AbCellera’s impressive list of partners and for patients suffering while they wait for a cure.

According to Dr. Carl Hansen, Director and CEO of AbCellera, the company has a rather unconventional hiring philosophy. In addition to drawing talent from obvious programs like biotechnology, AbCellera recruits from electrical engineering, computer science, finance, and management. The company’s broad recruiting strategy has attracted some of the best talent at UBC.

“In British Columbia, we have world-class science and expertise, particularly in genome science, stem cell research, engineering, and computation…[but] there’s not a huge biotech sector in Vancouver,” says Hansen. “So, if you were to take a classic hiring approach and hire people who have only had years of experience in pharma and biotech, you’d be overlooking a lion’s share of the great talent we have locally.”

Hansen continues by describing the ideal candidate as someone “who has passion, can learn quickly, and is interested in being a part of something that’s growing and at the cutting-edge. Someone who wants to make an impact.”

Not only is AbCellera impacting the way antibody therapies are developed, but its booming business is creating jobs in British Columbia’s up-and-coming biotechnology sector. Recent biological breakthroughs, increasing application of powerful computation, and an influx of capital, have created a fertile ecosystem for world-changing discoveries. It will be exciting to see what the future holds for biotechnology in British Columbia, and for rapidly growing companies like AbCellera.