UVic teams bring home major IBM CASCON Awards

Instrumented, interconnected, intelligent. Themes from this year’s IBM Canada Centre for Advanced Studies conference (CASCON) also describe two UVic award-winning research teams.

Dr. Hausi Muller and PhD student Norha Villegas (computer science) are the winners of the IBM Canada Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) Research Technology Incubation Lab Project of the Year 2011 as the CAS research team who best exemplifies the CAS mission.

Their project, “Managing Dynamic Context To Optimize Smart Interactions and Smart Services (SmarterContext)” paves the way for the use of software systems with context-aware capabilities in service-oriented systems, such as shopping, banking and education. The researchers demonstrated applications of SmarterContext with IBM’s WebSphere technologies, a suite of technologies widely used in industry.

In computer science terms, context characterizes changing situations in which people find themselves, including their preferences, social networks and the weather conditions around them. Muller and Villegas’s approach provides a way of tracking and managing information about these changing contexts so that it can be used in web and mobile applications to help people perform everyday tasks of different kinds. Motivated by on-the-ground needs in society, the researchers’ goal is to apply SmarterContext to other application domains, such as health care.

Also bringing honours from CASCON back to UVic is the research team from Ocean Networks Canada’s Center for Enterprise and Engagement (ONC/CEE). The team won the People’s Choice Technology Showcase Award for their poster presentation, “Ocean Networks Canada: Leveraging Parallelism in Deep Sea Video Analysis.” NEPTUNE’s Maia Hoeberechts, ONC co-op students Daniel Conti and Josh Erickson, and MA student Alyea Gebali presented at the conference.

The researchers’ poster presentation describes the first phase of the ONC/CEE, which implements new software for real-time analysis of video data from the ocean.

The IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) was established in Toronto in 1990 and brings together IBM, academic and government research organizations.