It seems to me that connecting with the past — or recognizing our broken connections with it — is key to being responsible to the present and the future. It makes us think about our place as a shared place, and reminds us that we have to look after it for those who come after us.

The Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project (SWIHHP) aims to document the history of two of the oldest areas of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. For Indigenous people through centuries, Ka’tarohkwi was a good place to fish, to gather, to trade. After Europeans arrived, the Inner Harbour became industrial, complete with railroads, factories, and docks; the Swamp Ward, adjacent to it, was where workers and their families lived, went to school, went to church, shopped, and played. The area continues to evolve in new ways. Through archival research and oral history, and starting with a focus on the twentieth century, SWIHHP brings people, time periods, spaces, and issues into Kingston’s story and out of the shadow of limestone buildings and celebrated politicians.

The project’s methods are both insistently material and persistently digital. The primary audience is conceived as people in the community itself. While face-to-face engagements are key (walking tours, listening parties, interviews, in situ photo exhibition, etc.), the website interface, app, and podcasts have engaged thousands of people, reflecting back to the neighbourhood and out to others the research as it unfolds. A 94-year-old project participant is one of the project’s most loyal followers on Facebook. In fact, SWIHHP Director Dr. Laura Murray met her on Facebook. At the same time, teenagers are engaged by finding digitally-enlarged family photographs on lawns around the neighbourhood. Digital technologies allow SWIHHP to produce high-quality audio and visual productions, but Dr. Murray and colleagues are committed to making sure the project remains very human at its core. Online engagement is a useful complement to other forms of communication and engagement. It does not replace public events and private interactions, but it reports on, enhances, and documents them. It also allows the SWIHHP team to try out — under the gaze of project participants and colleagues — interpretations that may later be presented to academic audiences. Thus online engagement is key to the ethical practice of the research, not merely a secondary tool for research dissemination.

For additional information, browse the Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project’s website.

Experiential learning is widely recognized as a deeply important educational tool. The value of giving students the opportunity not only to apply what they’ve learned, but also to interact with it in tangible, real ways is unmeasurable. Dr. Paul Hungler of the Queen’s Department of Chemical Engineering has had a long-standing interest in hands-on learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) related fields. Specifically, Dr. Hungler’s interest lies in virtual reality (VR) and its ability to give students access to unique experiential learning opportunities that would not be available to them otherwise. This coming January, Dr. Hungler and his team will begin to use a fully-immersive, educational VR app they’ve developed for first year students. The app’s purpose is to aid students in selecting an engineering discipline to pursue through exposure to different environments they may encounter in each particular discipline, such as an underground mine, or a solar power plant. Hungler and his team look forward to further developing this technology.

This new technology will offer for the first time, real‐time definition and pathological analysis of the tumour margins during surgery. It will allow surgeons to remove cancerous tissue with precision, decrease the incidence of positive margins, and thus avoid repeat surgeries and systemic therapies.

Removing a tumor from a person’s body is hard work. When a surgeon performs cancer removal procedures, their goal is to remove the tumor in its entirety with a rim of healthy tissue surrounding it, which allows them to determine that all the cancer has been removed. Still, surgeons must also be cautious to minimize the amount of healthy tissue they extract, a process that is complicated by the irregular shape of most tumors and their tendency to shift during surgery. Because of this, cancer removal procedures tend to be unpredictable – doctors may not be able to confirm they’ve removed a person’s cancer until tests are done on the tissue post-operation. 

Collaborating with researchers at the Imperial College in England, the Queen’s University Laboratory for Percutaneous Surgery (Perk Lab) has created a tool they call the “NaviKnife” to make tumor-removal procedures more effective. The tool is essentially a fusion of the British iKnife, a “smart” surgical instrument, and real-time electro-magnetic mapping capacity developed at Queen’s. The iKnife without this modification could only alert surgeons if they had cut into cancerous tissue, whereas the NaviKnife allows them to be proactive in avoiding cancerous tissue altogether. The Queen’s School of Computing, specifically Dr. Gabor Fichtinger and colleagues, has also been instrumental in the NaviKnife’s development, troubleshooting issues of electro-magnetic mapping. So far, a NaviKnife pilot study has been conducted on several women seeking breast-conserving surgery with positive outcomes. When the NaviKnife is used, fewer women had to get repeat surgeries—20% of the time additional surgeries were needed, in comparison to a current rate of 40-50%. The NaviKnife team looks forward to further developing this technology, and hopes to continue to reduce tumor removal procedures’ “positive margins”—instances wherein patients require additional procedures. 

I always tell my students that everything is a data problem.

Over the last twenty-five years, data has become a valuable resource of our increasingly digital-based and data-driven society.  Data processing is fundamental to the operation of many organizations and has evolved from performing basic transactions on files of structured records to performing complex analyses to support decision-making on large amounts of both structured and unstructured data.  Over this period, Professor Patrick Martin and the more than one hundred alumni members of the Database Systems Lab in the School of Computing at Queen’s University have carried out research to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of data storage, management and retrieval. The Lab’s research spans a variety of areas including autonomic computing, performance and workload management for database management systems, policy-based management for complex systems such as web services and database management systems, cloud computing and big data analytics.

More information can be found at the Database Systems Lab website.

The underlying goal of my research is to use machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, towards human-centric computing, pervasive computing, and human-computer interaction in order to analyze and understand, and interact with humans continuously in their natural environment.

The goal of the Ambient Intelligence and Interaction Laboratory (Amii) is to make every-day devices more intelligent and user-aware. Consequently, seamless integration of sensors and processors into our daily lives along with advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science methods are critical components of Ambient Intelligence and Ambient Interaction. 

Following are some of the concepts that the lab is and will be working on: 

• artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science 
• human-centric computing 
• user understanding and modeling 
• internet of things (IoT) 
• wearable technologies 
• mobile technologies 
• interactive systems 
• adaptive systems 
• predictive systems 
• affective computing 
• bio-signal analysis 
• human motion analysis 
• augmented, mixed, and virtual reality 
• human-computer interaction 
• biomedical and health analytics 

Amii uses state of the art technologies and innovative approaches to tackle some of the field’s biggest open research problems. The Amii team also works closely with industry to help them solve some of their ongoing problems and to propose and develop futuristic solutions. 

To learn more about the Amii Lab and its work, visit the Amii website. Dr. Ali Etemad, the director of Amii, also has his own website.

[…] perhaps it would be possible to find some of these people and see what they remember, and bring them back if not physically, at least virtually, digitally, with art.

Jerusalem, We Are Here is an interactive documentary that digitally brings Palestinians back into the Jerusalem neighbourhoods from which they were expelled in 1948. Focusing primarily on the neighbourhood of Katamon, Palestinian participants probed their families’ past and engaged with the painful present.

Directed by Queen’s professor Dorit Naaaman, the Jerusalem, We Are Here team produced short, poetic videos, filled with nostalgia, sorrow, and fleeting returns.  The films are embedded into a virtual tour where the audience – in Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris, Toronto and beyond – can “walk” down the streets of Katamon as these were filmed in 2012-2015. As we meander down the streets of contemporary Jerusalem, our soundscape is of the 1940s; and when we reach the home of each participant, we can watch the video/audio produced. As the generation of Palestinians who survived the Nakba (the 1948 catastrophe) is ageing and passing on, there is an urgent need to collect their stories and knowledge, and remap the space that has been declared entirely Israeli.  When people flee war, they rarely take with them their photo albums or documents or the art off the walls.  In Remapping Katamon, the map side of Jerusalem, We Are Here, we will continue to organically and communally remap the neighbourhood, house by house.

More information on the Jerusalem, We Are Here project can be found here. To find out more about Dr. Dorit Naaman and her work, visit her website.

The unique features of this course lie in its collaborative social learning opportunities and creative assignments—from idea-storming to journey-mapping, napkin sketches to pitch decks.

Design thinking is an innovation method for arriving at human-centred creative solutions. At its core, the process is powered by empathy, so design thinkers develop a deep understanding of the needs, desires, motivations and frustrations their users experience. In the process, design thinking guides innovation teams to envision, build, and deliver more intuitive, frictionless, delightful, and effective user experiences. 

From education to health care, in the performing arts, engineering, social services and human relations, from manufacturing to retail—and everything in-between, design thinking is being used across cultural, academic, and business sectors. As a collaborative and creative problem-solving method that delivers rapid results, the design thinking approach resonates widely with those seeking to drive corporate, technical, and social innovation.  

By the end of the course, participants will have improved their critical observation and listening skills, their creative thinking and ideation proficiencies, and their digital and visual communication competencies. This course uses an open textbook created by Sidneyeve Matrix who adapted three existing open resources on design thinking into a single new open text, with funding from eCampusOntario.

For more information, browse the Dan School of Music and Drama’s website. You can also read the Design Thinking course description here. 

From a scientific standpoint, it’s a very exciting cross-disciplinary endeavour that involves bringing together expertise from clinical medicine, computer science, signal processing, epidemiology, genomics. We’re trying to find a way to bring all those data under the same roof so that they can be made available to clinicians at the bedside who are treating patients with rapidly evolving illnesses.

Patients receiving treatment in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital are inevitably hooked up to a number of monitoring devices, all of which generate massive amounts of data. However, save for measures of blood pressure and heart rate most of this data is discarded, or at the very least goes unused. Dr. David Maslove, a specialist in Critical Care Medicine with the Queen’s Department of Medicine, is looking to challenge this – rather than ignoring the rise of biomedical Big Data, researchers should use it to their advantage.  

Recognizing the value of data collected in the ICU, Maslove and colleagues formed the CONDUIT (Combining Novel Datasets to Understand Illness Trajectory) lab. The CONDUIT lab hopes to develop novel datasets that are able to merge different types of biomedical data, as well as analytic tools to turn those data into actionable medical knowledge. With the datasets in question being so large, the CONDUIT lab team is not only made up of medical researchers but academics in the fields of computing and statistics. Overall, the lab’s aim is facilitate better understanding of acute illnesses, both for research purposes and to aid in clinical decision-making processes. 

To learn more about the CONDUIT lab, browse its website. You can also learn more about David Maslove and his work in this (e)Affect article.

The Mayor’s Innovation Challenge is an extraordinary opportunity for the City to develop new innovative ideas for municipal service delivery while identifying its future workforce.

Kingston faces a series of complex challenges as it works toward its vision of becoming a smart, livable, 21st century city and is seeking solutions from student innovators. The Mayor’s Innovation Challenge calls on student teams from Kingston’s major post-secondary institutions to develop fresh ideas to address identified challenges faced by the City. In partnership with Queen’s University, St. Lawrence College and the Royal Military College, the City is hosting this experiential problem-solving and learning opportunity for its second year.

Current and recently graduated post-secondary students are eligible to submit proposals addressing one of these four challenges in two stream categories:

• Dunin-Deshpande Smart Cities Stream
  • Smart Cities Challenge
• Public Sector Innovation Stream
  • Engaging Residents in Long-Term Care
  • Revitalizing Public Spaces
  • Reducing Carbon Emissions

The winning team of the Dunin-Deshpande Smart Cities Stream receives a four-month paid internship with the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre and $4,000 in seed capital. Winners from of the Public Sector Innovation Stream receive a four-month paid internship with a municipal department with the City and an operating budget of $10,000 to implement their idea.

Technical Art History allows us an almost intimate look into a painting’s genesis, as if we are granted a temporary glimpse over the shoulder of the artist. Its most amazing quality is that it can often help to a better understanding of the artist’s intent.

Dr. Ron Spronk is a technical art historian. He is particularly interested in the creative process of paintings, which can be examined through the use of various imaging technologies, including infrared reflectography, macrophotography, and X-radiography, as shown here from left to right in a detail from Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. Infrared is used to reveal underdrawings, the sketches that painters used to prepare their compositions. Macrophotography allows for the close study of paintings in extreme resolutions, in this project up to 1250 DPI, enabling microscopic magnifications. X-radiography reveals the different absorption patterns of X-rays of the materials that were used. Some pigments, such as lead white or vermillion (which contains mercury), will absorb X rays, while others will remain X ray transparent. When studied in unison, such documentation allows for the study of an artist’s artistic process. These details of Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna show, for example, that Bruegel made several revisions to the initially underdrawn composition. The location of some of the dogs was changed, and the lower figure was initially not included, but a later addition. This hunter was painted over the already finished background, what explains that more X rays are absorbed here. The tree trunk is relatively dark since that was painted as planned, and carefully left ‘in reserve’ from the snow. (You can click here to make this detail interactive.)  Dr. Spronk was instrumental to the production of two highly popular web applications that provide general access to such images. The application Closer to Van Eyck is a comprehensive resource on the current restoration of famous Ghent Altarpiece (1432). The site Inside Bruegel, on the twelve panel paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Vienna, was developed in conjunction with the 2018-2019 exhibition Bruegel, The Hand of the Master, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.