The award was presented at the Summer Simulation Multi-Conference organized by SCS, held in Toronto.  It recognizes a variety of Wainer’s technical contributions to the modeling and simulation discipline which have been widely disseminated in technical literature.

Wainer has had more than 280 papers published and four books, two of which are in Spanish. In 2011, he was awarded the Outstanding Professional Contribution Award by the SCS. His current work focuses on methodologies and techniques for improving models and simulations by making them faster, easier to use and more useful.

Established in 1952, the SCS works to advance the use of modelling and simulation to solve real-world problems and facilitate communication among industry professionals.

Carleton is hosting the conference, the theme of which is Making it Happen: From Intention to Action. It embraces the positive progress in creating accessible and inclusive communities and brings together a diverse leadership collective to share achievement and create action.

Proposals must fall under one or more of these topics

• Improving community access through innovative technologies
• New developments in sensor technology
• Sensor Technology: Invasive or Empowering?
• Motivation beyond the Minimum: From compliance to competitive advantage
• An Integrated Strategy for the Design of urban outdoor spaces?
• Retrofitting for accessibility: Case studies of community infrastructure retrofit projects
• Collaborating on accessible communities
• Making a Difference: governments in action to improve community accessibility
• Legislation and its impact
• Trends and opportunities in the design and construction industry
• A new world order: the evolution of impact of accessibility polices around the world
• Become a disability-smart organization: How to recruit the best candidates with and without disabilities
• Delivering your business goals by creating an inclusive environment
• The win-win: benefits of major international events on community accessibility
• Differentiation and marketing; how to showcase your accessibility to attract new consumers
• “A World of Good Practice” sessions for our themes: accessible communities, innovation and technology as well as employment. This is a fast-paced type of presentation making for dynamic sessions that will spark lively conversations. Presenters will have 8 minutes to present slides in a rapid-fire presentation

These prizes recognize efforts that go beyond specific research programs and are intended to reward faculty members’ activities and initiatives that are integral to the enhancement of the vibrant research culture at Carleton.

Carleton has among its faculty some outstanding researchers who go well beyond the needs of their own scholarly work to engage in building a broad and sustainable foundation that supports research excellence, student engagement, and Carleton’s impact on real-world issues. They might do so by mentoring their junior colleagues, or by building new initiatives and/or partnerships that allow their colleagues and students to take advantage of new opportunities.

The prizes consist of the Faculty Mentoring Award, Building Connections Award and the Research-Academic Excellence Award. We are now seeking nominations to recognize the exceptional contribution of our faculty.

Nominations are due in the Carleton University Research Office by Aug. 15.

For more information on the awards, eligibility, and deadlines, please visit: http://www1.carleton.ca/curo/prizes-awards/.

Craig, a PhD student in software defined networking, developed a set of modules that form a mobile architecture for spectrum sensing that, because of its customizability and affordability, fills a fundamental requirement in society.

Carleton Systems and Computer Engineering professor Dr. Ioannis Lambadaris believes we need equipment of this caliber – equipment that is portable, easy-to-configure, and can do this kind of sensing.

“[The] application ranges from law enforcement to security applications and military applications in the battlefield…it’s a very broad area.”

Doing what can usually only be done in FPGA (field-programmable gate array) circuits, Craig’s mobile architecture splits aggregate digital signals into sub-bands to allow for quick processing; all in an off-the-shelf, easy-to-use package.

“The main benefit is that systems that would have previously been custom-designed expensive hardware are now just a software module that you can run on an off-the-shelf Linux server,” he explains. This makes the systems much faster to develop, more flexible, cheaper, and easier to extend.

The project came about as part of Craig’s graduate studies, where he was working one day a week at D-TA Systems, a company chaired by Carleton alumnus Dr. Dipak Roy that offers reconfigurable box level radio, radar, signals intelligence, and sonar products that can be reconfigured for any application. Roy is committed to supporting the university and the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, and promoting the area of DSP. Recently, Roy sponsored the development of an advanced sonar processing laboratory housed in Carleton’s Canal Building.

Established in November 2011 through a generous donation by Roy and his wife, also a Carleton alumna, the Dipak and Tara Roy Advanced Sensor Processing Laboratory enables students and researchers to collect and study sensor data to help focus research and develop the next generation of radio frequency and acoustic multichannel applications.

“The Advanced Sensor Processing Lab was set up to do graduate research and develop expertise and skills in the complex field of sonar, radar, communication, and test and measurements systems. The goal is to create a centre of excellence in an area of national interest with broad industry and academic participation. The lab is off to a good start, in a short time of less than three years, five students have already received their Master’s degree working on various research topics of significant relevance to the defence and security communities. There is a lot more to come as the interest in this sector of the economy is growing steadily and the Carleton lab is the only one of its kind in the country,” says Roy.

Craig worked closely with Roy on this project, and credits him for bringing him up to speed on the operations and theory of DSP.

Moving forward, this incredibly promising post-graduate student says the modules can be integrated to build a complete spectrum analyzer product. As for how this development will impact the community, Lambadaris points to cybersecurity.

“This area is so advanced…we should have equipment that will be able to immediately capture traffic and analyze it in real time in order to locate criminals and terrorists. This is a fundamental requirement in any society to have a peaceful and reliable existence.”

Bottomley, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry,  will use his scholarship to pursue his photonics research in collaboration with Drs. Jacques Albert and Winnie Ye from the Department of Electronics.

“Most of my research is focused on the properties of silver nanocubes, which are just very tiny cubes made out of ordinary silver metal,” says Bottomley. “The special properties of these tiny metal cubes comes from the fact that they are so small they interact with visible light very strongly, essentially trapping the light in the cube. I am working with Dr. Albert to use these cubes and optic fibers to produce a powerful versatile sensing platform, and with Dr. Ye in an attempt to increase the efficiency of thin film solar cells.”

Aleali and Xiong are both members of Dr. Ye’s Micro/NanoPhotonics Group. Their silicon photonics research with Dr. Ye and collaborators at the National Research Council Canada is aimed at utilizing existing fabrication facilities to provide much faster and cheaper optical telecom devices.

Aleali, a master’s student, is working on an efficient optical modulation device that encodes digital data on a stream of light, using what’s called Pockels effect in Silicon.

Explains Aleali:  “Essentially it converts an electrical signal to an optical signal which can then travel with speed of light across the room, the city, or the world. We expect this research will be used in next generation telecom and datacom networks.”

Xiong, a PhD candidate, is focusing on designing novel photonic devices based on silicon photonic platforms. The devices can manipulate the light in the submicron scale, which is useful for sensing biomolecules.

The International Society for Optics and Photonics is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The society serves more than 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.

The prize went to James Opp, co-director of the Centre for Public History; Anthony Whitehead, director, School of Information Technology; and Will Knight, project manager and PhD candidate, Department of History

“The Rideau Timescapes App is a truly collaborative project involving students from Information Technology and graduate researchers with the Centre for Public History,” said Opp.  “It is a tremendous honour to be acknowledged on a national level for our efforts.”

The award recognizes work that achieves high standards of original research, scholarship and presentation; brings an innovative public history contribution to its audience; and serves as a model for future work, advancing the field of public history in Canada.

The Carleton team has given the public a new way to delve into the history of the Rideau waterway. The free app enables visitors to interact with the visual heritage of 26 lock stations along the canal. It is available for download at the Apple App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

App users have access to more than 700 historic photographs through a map interface. Short histories of the canal and its lock stations are available at the tap of a button. Users can also slide through time to see the changing landscape in the unique Timescape view. The app will even detect the user’s current position and jump to the nearest site.

The zoomable images can also be overlaid with contemporary scenes in real time through the phone camera, allowing users to position the historical image within the landscape and adjust the amount of transparency.

Funded in part by the Department of Canadian Heritage, the app is available in both French and English. Click here to read more about the Rideau Timescapes App. To download the app, click here.

The total amount of money to be received by Carleton researchers is nearly $2 million. The Leaders Opportunity Fund will help Carleton acquire infrastructure for research faculty to undertake cutting-edge research. It will also help Carleton create competitive packages of research support in the form of infrastructure and a portion of the operating and maintenance costs from the CFI, coupled with direct research costs from partner organizations.

Rayhani will receive support for a proposed earthquake simulator facility with network interface capabilities for collaborative earthquake and vibration research. By creating a device that can reproduce the earthquake ground-shaking loading, seismic tests of large-sized soil-structure models, such as high-rise building, bridges and other critical infrastructure, can be performed.

Thanks to a donation by Tom Skinner, MEng/72, who donated funds to run a two-year pilot project that will help engineering students begin to commercialize a fourth-year group project, Inglis and Baytekin will be able to take the project further. Inglis also received a Wes Nicol award through Carleton Entrepreneurs to explore commercialization of the technology. The project previously won the Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) competition this year.

With the cost of a modern myoelectric prosthetic hand in Canada ranging from $15,000 to $50,000, cost is a significant barrier to ownership for many amputees in Canada and abroad. Additionally, hand functionality is limited among these more moderately priced devices. Many of these hands only have the ability to open and close in a single grip. Higher functionality, such as independently actuated fingers capable of many grips comes at an even higher price.

The team focused on designing an afforable prosthetic with emphasis on the design of the mechanical hand, intelligent motor control logic, haptic feedback implementation, and integration of all of the individual system components into a functional prototype.

To develop an inexpensive electromechanical hand that was a reasonable analog of a human hand and an inexpensive EMG-based control  platform, the team decided that the mechanical hand components should be created using a 3D printer. The EMG control platform is comprised of inexpensive, readily available components.

The 3D-printed hand prototype was modeled, printed and assembled for less than $250. The hand contains over 30 components, including 15 unique printed components. It is actuated with high-torque hobby servos that are controlled by pulse width modulated (PWM) signals regulated by the microcontroller. The EMG interface works by acquiring differential signals from muscle impulses in the residual limb of the user. Those signals are then amplified, and passed to a high-resolution analog to digital converter (ADC). The ADC then outputs the signals over aserial peripheral interface (SPI) to the microcontroller. Control logic embedded in the microcontroller captures combinations of muscle impulses. A pressure sensor on the gripping surface of the prosthetic thumb provides feedback to the microcontroller to control the pressure applied when the prosthetic hand grips an object. A haptic feedback system creates vibration in response to a successfully received command.

The prosthetic hand is nimble when it comes to opening doors or picking up small items, such as eggs. It has a firm, but non-crushing grip.

The control system is customizable for each user. A child who receives her first myoelectric arm at the age of three will use a simple control scheme that requires one or two electrodes and only a single opcode. As the child grows, she will be able to incrementally increase the number of channels and the number of opcodes used, increasing the functionality of her hand.

Read the full report.

Etemad is working onhis doctorate in electrical and computer engineering under the supervision of Ali Arya.

“Our research is intended for character control in animated movies and video games as well as extraction of information from motion patterns,” says Etemad. “So in addition to multimedia applications, it could also have an impact on surveillance systems to help recognize and track suspects.”

Etemad says he enjoys the freedom of his program: “The Department of Systems and Computer Engineering and the School of Information Technology aren’t confined to classical definitions of computer engineering. The school is very multidisciplinary and is involved with different fields such as human-computer interaction, networks, photonics and laser.”