Computer Science

Meet U of T's Inventors of the Year

Author: 
Jenny Hall
Picture: 
photo of Inventor of the Year winners and U of T administrators

Dietary advice tailored to your DNA and a “bio-printer” that prints skin-like tissue that can be used to dress wounds are two inventions that might change your life in coming years.

They’re also two of 10 inventions whose creators were celebrated May 15 at the University of Toronto’s 2013 Inventors of the Year ceremony.

Posted Friday, May 17, 2013

Bianca Schroeder: creating more efficient, reliable data centres

Author: 
Don Campbell
Picture: 
photo of Bianca Schroeder

University of Toronto Scarborough professor Bianca Schroeder is on a mission to create more reliable and efficient massive data centres.

These hulking facilities, which are used by companies and organizations to house their essential data and computer networks, consume vast amounts of energy and continue to experience system failures. 

Posted Friday, April 26, 2013

Decoding a deluge of data

Sub-title: 
Two U of T projects receive $1 million each for bioinformatics research
Author: 
Jenny Hall
Picture: 
photo of professor at computer

Two University of Toronto research projects have won $1 million each in funding from the Government of Canada through Genome Canada and the Ontario Genomics Institute.

The Genome Canada 2012 Bioinformatics and Computational Biology competition, a partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, supports the development of the next generation of tools to deal with the large influx of data produced by today’s genomics technologies

Posted Thursday, April 25, 2013

Fully, Completely: explaining a thesis in three minutes

Sub-title: 
U of T students take top prizes in competition
Author: 
Lily Yee-Sloan
Picture: 
Jasdeep Saggar (left) took top honours and Abraham Hefits (right) placed second

It was not your typical dissertation panel: a swimmer, a lawyer, an economist, a policy analyst and a guitarist from the Tragically Hip.

They gathered at Queen’s University to judge 30 doctoral presentations from students representing 16 Ontario universities at the Ontario Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition.

Each graduate student had three minutes, one static slide, and no other props to convey their research topic to the non-specialist judging panel. The University of Toronto entered two scholars.

Posted Wednesday, April 24, 2013

U of T spinoff company raises 873% of funding for tiny, smarter keyboard

Sub-title: 
Whirlscape closes Indiegogo campaign
Picture: 
Photo of a smartphone showing the tiny keyboard

The Indiegogo campaign for Minuum, “the little keyboard for big fingers,” created by the University of Toronto startup Whirlscape Inc., has closed after raising $87,369 in one month.

Whirlscape reached its initial goal — $10,000 to fund the launch of an Android keyboard app — within 14 hours of launching the campaign on March 18. Its video has now been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

Posted Friday, April 19, 2013

U of T undergraduate entrepreneurs sell web services startup

Sub-title: 
Chime aggregates tweets, Facebook notifications, emails
Author: 
Sara Franca
Picture: 
photo of three entrepreneurial students

Three University of Toronto undergraduate students with a passion for entrepreneurship are packing their bags for Cambridge, Massachusetts after selling their startup company for an undisclosed sum.

About a year ago, Fahd Ananta (Computer Science), Guru Mahendran (Engineering: Aerospace), and Thariq Shihipar (Engineering: Electrical & Computer Engineering), began developing a web services aggregator, Chime.

Posted Thursday, March 28, 2013

Science at the Movies: Short Circuit

Sub-title: 
Discussing artificial intelligence with U of T's experts
Author: 
Brianna Goldberg
Picture: 
Short circuit between two nails causes sparks.

Before there was Wall-E, before Star Trek's Commander Data, there was Johnny Five: the sentient robot starring alongside Ally Sheedy and Steve Gutenberg in Short Circuit, a family-friendly film from 1986 that introduced a generation of kids to the wonders of artificial intelligence.

Tomorrow night, Johnny Five will drive discussion between audience members and U of T experts at the latest instalment of Science at the Movies.

Posted Monday, March 25, 2013

U of T spinoff company launches tiny, smarter keyboard

Author: 
Elizabeth Monier-Williams
Picture: 
Photo of an iPhone showing the newly developed keyboard app.

For users of mobile, touchscreen devices it's an appealing idea: what if you could make a smarter, more accurate keyboard yet gain more space on your touchscreen?

Meet Minuum, “the little keyboard for big fingers" from Whirlscape Inc., a tech start-up from Associate Professor Khai Truong of the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science and alumnus Will Walmsley of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. 

Posted Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Google acquires U of T neural networks company

Author: 
Sara Franca
Picture: 
photo of grad students with Professor Hinton

University Professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students from the Department of Computer Science have sold their startup company to Google Inc.

Google acquired the company, incorporated by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Hinton in 2012, for its research on deep neural networks. Also known as “deep learning” for computers, this research involves helping machines understand context.

Posted Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Professor Stephen Cook, Herzberg medallist

Sub-title: 
Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering
Author: 
Jessica Lewis
Picture: 
photo of Stephen Cook at blackboard

Stephen Cook is among a short list of mathematics researchers whose ideas have spawned new fields of inquiry for current and future generations —and he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto.

A professor of computer science and mathematics, Cook is the 2012 winner of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s Herzberg Medal.

Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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