News

At QSC, we believe that the future is in the making, that’s why we love empowering the next wave of tech innovators!

This winter, the School proudly sponsored Hack the Ridge 2024, a high-octane, 12-hour innovation challenge at Iroquois Ridge High School. Students teamed up to tackle real-world problems with innovative solutions and wowed everyone with their creative pitches. From hands-on workshops to electrifying demos, it was a day bursting with energy that defines our next generation of computing leaders. 

The School of Computing is also proud to sponsor the upcoming Ignition Hacks event. Scheduled to take place July 2025, Ignition Hacks promises to be more than just a hackathon, but rather a multi-faceted platform of workshops, mentorship opportunities, co-op fairs, and more, aimed at supporting tech education and opportunities for students to help them prepare for a growing technology industry.

The School of Computing is proud to announce that Dr. Parvin Mousavi and Dr. Mohammad Zulkernine were renewed as Tier 1 Canada Research Chairs in the latest announcement on November 14, 2025. The Canada Research Chairs program is prestigious national initiative that recognizes outstanding research excellence in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry, announced Dr. Mousavi and Dr. Zulkernine among the 224 Canada Research Chairs (CRCs) across Canada, who push research frontiers and drive scientific innovation in Canada.

Parvin Mousavi’s biomedical research uses cutting-edge AI advancements to improve disease diagnosis, medical interventions, and personalized treatments. Mohammad Zulkernine’ s work integrates AI, communications networks, and privacy principles to make autonomous vehicles safer.

You can learn more about the research of the 16 newly announced CRC’s at Queen’s in this article by the Queen’s Gazzette.

Congratulations to our team from Queen’s School of Computing, who won first place in the international Chengdu80 FinTech Hackathon, held at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE) in China!

Xiaomin Cheng, Adam Clarkes, Chloe Houvardas, Vinicius Porfirio Purgato, Nolan Ling, and Amr Zaki and their team the “Data Queens” travelled 30+ hours from Kingston to Chengdu to attend the competition, joined by Wendy Powley and Dr. Yuanzhu Chen.

The competing teams were asked to produce a prototype to solve problems arising from autonomous vehicles for a hypothesized insurance company. After 80 hours of design and development, Data Queens placed #1 and received the event’s Trailblazer’s Award and CN¥40,000 (about 7,800 CAD) of prize money.

Congratulations to all the winners, and special thank you to Yuanzhu Chen and Wendy Powley for supporting our team throughout the competition!

“Data Queens” was among the 8 invited teams of students from Canada, United States, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China Mainland, representing over 20 countries.

The teams were asked to produce a prototype to solve problems arising from autonomous vehicles for a hypothesized insurance company.

We thank the host university SWUFE for keeping the students engaged with various sightseeing and team-building activities throughout the week. Our students return with the trophy, new friendships, and unforgettable memories.

Welcome home, and Go Queen’s!

Queen’s School of Computing is thrilled to announce that a team from the GOAL Lab has been awarded the Best Challenge Paper at the prestigious 2024 AIware Conference, held in Brazil in conjunction with the 2024 International Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE).  

Their paper, titled “Automated Scheduling for Thematic Coherence in Conferences,” highlights innovative research that bridges the fields of Operations Research and Natural Language Processing. 

This project, led by Ph.D. student Mahzabeen Emu, with contributions from Tasnim Ahmed and Dr. Salimur Choudhury, tackles the complexities of thematic scheduling in conferences. The practical applications of this research, particularly in the context of healthcare scheduling, underscore the real-world impact of their work. 

By optimizing scheduling, hospitals can better allocate resources, improve patient care, and reduce wait times, leading to more efficient and effective healthcare delivery. 

This recognition exemplifies the collaborative spirit and interdisciplinary approach that Queen’s School of Computing fosters. 

We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Mahzabeen, Tasnim, and Dr. Choudhury for this accomplishment! 

Earlier this month, the Government of Canada announced the results of the latest round of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)’s Discovery Grants. The Discovery Grants program supports excellent research in natural sciences and engineering and is Canada’s largest government research funding program of its kind. Three Queen’s School of Computing researchers have received support from NSERC in the current cycle.

This news follows a number of earlier successful funding announcements  from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

We congratulate our faculty on the recognition and support of the federal research funding programs:

Dr. Kai Salomaa

• NSERC Discovery Grant Program, in support of the project Descriptional complexity and applications of formal languages and automata.

Dr. Yuan Tian and Dr. Bram Adams

• NSERC Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) Program, in support of the project An experimental platform to comparatively evaluate large pre-trained models on SE tasks.

Dr. Hesham Elsawy and Dr. Salimur Choudhury

• Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) John R. Evans Leadership Fund (JELF) Program, in support of the project Diverse, perceptive, and intelligent wireless infrastructure for 6G and beyond.

Dr. Gabor Fichtinger

• National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Ideation Fund, in support of the project Open-source implementation and evaluation of low-cost hand- and finger-tracking technology for fine motor skill assessment.

Dr. Ting Hu

• National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Collaborative Science, Technology, and Innovation Program, in support of a project in partnership with the University of Ottawa, The digital mouse – a digital twin of behavioral indices of neurodegeneration and associated metabolic determinants for explainable in silico therapy design.

Queen’s School of Computing researcher Amber Simpson is part of a larger multi-institute team lead by University of Toronto to receive $19 Million Federal Funding for BioHubNet.

Biomanufacturing Hub Network (BioHubNet) is a talent development program among four research programs in the Canadian Hub for Health Intelligence and Innovation in Infectious Diseases (HI3)  that has received a total of $72 million in federal funding. This major investment from the Canada Biomedical Research Fund (CBRF) was announced on May 6, 2024 to address the severe shortage of industry-ready highly qualified personnel (HQP) in the biomanufacturing sector.

BioHubNet is a collaborative research project, comprised by a scientific team of researchers from leading Canadian Universities and hospitals.

These researchers will leverage their 26 industry and training partners, which include multinational and homegrown biotechnology companies. With nearly $19 million from CBRF, BioHubNet will work closely with these partners to develop a range of training programs that provide experiential and topical training to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and biotechnology professionals.

According to the Government of Canada, these CBRF-BRIF investments are aimed at “growing a robust, competitive, domestic biomanufacturing and life sciences sector ensures that Canada has access to critical vaccines, therapeutics and other life-saving medicines.”