@DCS Newsletter 2013

2013

From Instinct to Evidence: Faculty in the Department are Researching the Inverted Classroom Method PAGE 8

Page 6 Video Game

Design @ U of T Page 9 A Look at the Computational

Vision Research Group Page 12 Konrad Group

Establishes an Undergraduate Scholarship

Message From the Chair

Students

Looking back on the past year, I see some particularly exciting areas of growth emerging in the department, which I am thrilled to share with you.

Undergraduate and Graduate UG Profile: Michael Andreae ......................... 3 UG Profile: Leila Chan Currie . . ....................... 3 Grad Profile: Elizabeth Patitsas . . .................. 4 Research Profile: Peckalytics ......................... 4 2013 Cressy Winners ........................................ 5 Grad Students Going Places .......................... 5

New Educational Initiatives We have taken a leadership role in the university’s first foray into massive open online courses (“MOOCs”). The department offered three of U of T’s first five courses on the Coursera platform – a two-course “Learn to Program” sequence by Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries, and a course on neural networks

by Geoffrey Hinton. Over 240,000 students are currently signed up for the three courses! (See pg. 8 for more information on these MOOCs and how our faculty have used the MOOC experience and materials to enhance courses for U of T students.) These efforts have attracted interest from around the world, garnering attention from top media outlets such as the New York Times, Globe & Mail, Forbes, BBC, and the like. (See the Globe & Mail piece here: http://tinyurl.com/uoftmooc) As leaders in research and teaching, we are at the forefront of this revolution in teaching.

Our professional master’s program, started three years ago, continues to blossom. The Master of Science in Applied Computing (MScAC) offers a growing number of students the unique opportunity to further develop their knowledge of technology, both through coursework and when they take the latest research results out to industry during an 8-month internship. We continue to expand the program, slowly growing the yearly cohort with a diverse crop of talented domestic and international students.

Increasing Industrial Connections & Impact I am delighted to see industry building stronger relationships with the department, be it playing a role in our annual Research in Action (RIA) showcase as a sponsor, exploring research collaborations with our faculty and students, or hosting an internship for our MScAC program. The burgeoning number of startups being spun out of the department, in all areas of computer science, is incredibly exciting. You may have heard about the recent acquisitions of DNNresearch and Chime (read pg. 16). The climate in the department is changing, as more

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Contents

TEACHING

Video Game Design @ U of T . . ..................... 6

RESEARCH

Research on the Inverted Classroom Method . . ........................................... 8 Computational Vision ....................................... 9

Faculty & Staff

“It is essential that we continue to bring in exceptional young faculty to build on the department’s foundation and help us grow in new directions...” and more of our students display their entrepreneurial spirit, even early in their undergraduate years.

Looking Ahead The enthusiasm of our alumni continues to inspire me. It is wonderful to see these successful professionals so eager to give back to the department and our students. Our mentorship program really took off this year, more than doubling in size. We continue to increase the number of events bringing together students and alumni, and are grateful to have such a dedicated and brilliant group of DCS alumni.

Last, but not least, I am looking forward to strengthening the department through new faculty hires over the coming years. It is essential that we continue to bring in exceptional young faculty to build on the department’s foundation and help us grow in new directions – not only maintaining our global reputation for greatness, but pushing our scholarship, teaching, and research in exciting new directions.

It is an exciting time for us, as we prepare to celebrate the department’s 50th anniversary year, starting next June. You’ll be hearing more about that in the coming year!

Sven Dickinson Chair, DCS

Corporate Telephathy: Granata Decision Systems . . .........................10 Profile: Jim Clarke ............................................11 Staff Q&A . . ..........................................................11 Profile: Ron Baecker .......................................12

Alumni

Konrad Group Scholarship ..........................12 Profile: Teresa Almeida .. ................................13 Profile: Ian Chan .. .............................................13

Life at DCS

In Focus .. ..............................................................16 DCS in the Media . . ...........................................16 Cover photo: (Clockwise, starting on the upper right) Michelle Craig, Jennifer Campbell, Diane Horton and Paul Gries.

@dcs 2013

Vol. 1, No. 5

ISSN 1913-2611 Sara Franca Orbelina Cortez Editorial Board: Steve Engels, Diane Horton, Riet van Lieshout Contributors: Teresa Almeida, Michael Andreae, Ronald Baecker, Craig Boutilier, Ian Chan, Jim Clarke, Leila Chan Currie, Sven Dickinson, David Fleet, Alice Han, Allan Jepson, Kyros Kutulakos, Tyler Lu, Elizabeth Patitsas Design: JoAnn McHardy Cover Photo: John Loper Photography Editor- in - Chief:

MANAGING EDITOR:

COMMENTS AND ADDRESS UPDATES SHOULD BE SENT TO: Editor, @dcs Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 10 King’s College Road, Room 3302 Toronto, ON M5S 3G4 Tel: 416-978-3619 Fax: 416-978-1931 E-mail: dcs-newsletter@cs.toronto.edu Website: www.cs.toronto.edu Twitter: @uoft_cs Copyright 2013. All rights reserved.

STUDENTS | undergraduate and graduate

Profile: Michael

Andreae, Third-year undergraduate student

Q: What is it about computer science that appeals to you the most?

A: I think computers have the amazing ability to enhance our workflows and lives. The thrill of creating a solution, and seeing someone’s expression when they say, “Wow, a computer can help me do that?”, is such a great feeling.

Q: Are you currently working on a project?

If so, can you tell us about it?

A: In my free time, I’m building a website for the U of T’s E.J. Pratt Library using Drupal, which is an open source content management platform for building websites and applications. The website will manage the library’s special collection and allow the librarians to

update the material as new collections are added. My experience in CSC343, Introduction to Databases, as well as systems programming, has proven to be very useful for this task.

Another project that I’ve been working on is building a shirt that allows you to play Pong on it. (No copying me, it’s not done yet!) It’s a bit of electronics, programming, human computer interaction, and the sociology of wearing a shirt that people can interact with.

Currently, I am working on installing paddle controls on the shirt’s arms (studs that clip into the clothing wired to a touch sensor),

Profile: Leila Chan Currie, Second-year undergraduate student Leila Chan Currie has her mind set. “I want to make the world a better place,” she maintains.

“As idealistic as that sounds, I think the skills I’m learning in computer science will help me do just that.” While one day Chan Currie may be changing the world through code, right now the computer science and statistics major is absorbed in solving problems and being challenged academically. “Anyone can write code,” says Chan Currie. “The hard part is writing elegant, efficient code. I think that’s something I’ll be working to improve for as long as I’m in CS.” The aspiring entrepreneur is already putting her skills to work. Last year, Chan Currie created a website called Coursewiz (coursewiz.leila.cc) for U of T students.

Coursewiz allows students to easily find courses they want to take; the website features course descriptions, details, comments and ratings by students. “It was a great learning experience, and it’s awesome knowing that Coursewiz was able to help thousands of students during course registration.” Coursewiz will be available for students again this year, and the website is already up and running with updated course details for the 2013-2014 school year.

This summer, Chan Currie is working on other exciting projects. She is currently a paid

intern at Google in Mountain View, California and she is occupied creating another website with a peer at MIT. The pair are creating a website for people to connect with other people who share the same interests. “Users will be able to propose activities, like playing a poker game or going to a movie; people nearby will see those posts and attend if they’re interested,” explains Chan Currie.

“The project’s goal is to help people casually meet new people.” The plan is to have university students use the website to find other students with the same interests on campus; Chan Currie is hoping that the website’s popularity will grow on campus and take off from there. “We’re only in the design phase right now, but with any luck you’ll be hearing about the finished site in the fall.”

When Chan Currie isn’t creating websites, she’s on the ice with the U of T Varsity Blues’ Women’s hockey team. For Chan Currie the best part about playing in Varsity Blues hockey is the team spirit and athleticism.

Chan Currie may not be impacting the entire world just yet, but as she heads into her third year of undergraduate studies, she is definitely making a big impression on student life at U of T. n

and covering the front in addressable LED strips. The challenge is getting a high-enough resolution as well as allowing the ball to travel in different trajectories. The whole project was born out of curiosity.

Q: Of everything that you have accomplished in terms of projects, research and course work at the department, what are you most proud of so far? And why?

A: I had the great privilege of working in DCS’ human computer interaction lab with Professor Daniel Wigdor and postdoc Ricardo Jota, building what can be described as the bicycle of the future. The bike features a small projector, turn indicators, and a variety of touch interfaces with sensors. In the end, I helped build a bike which lets you do a variety of things, such as safely navigate on Google Maps and receive text messages while you ride.

Q: Are there any professors or people at DCS that have influenced or inspired you?

A: I’ve had so many great professors. They are all really amazing at explaining things, answering questions and making sure we learn. I feel motivated by the research that students and faculty are developing at DCS. Karen Reid’s MarkUs project and Paul Gries’ work on python memory management have been a source of inspiration for me. There are a number of great projects at DCS and great professors ready to make them happen.

Q: Are you currently involved in any extracurricular activities at U of T or outside of school?

A: I take ballet at Hart House, aerial silks at the Flying Arts Collective and I’m learning the violin. However, there is no chance of me leaving computer science anytime soon for a musical career, unless out of tune becomes the next “in tune”.

One of my other passions is acting and film-making. It combines being outgoing with the manipulation of data and cool electronics.

Recently, I played the body of a 14-year-old girl – yes, a girl – on Netflix’s new horror thriller TV series Hemlock Grove; during filming breaks, I helped my co-star with high school algebra.

It’s amazing how you use math in your everyday life! n

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STUDENTS | undergraduate and graduate

Research profile: Peckalytics WHAT: A social network analysis (SNA) tool for Pinterest that can identify those users in its virtual community with the strongest influence.

It visualizes, models, and analyzes community interactions and engagement within Pinterest.

This research is currently being done as an Undergraduate Summer Research project.

WHO: Undergraduate student Elaine Malit, PhD candidate Milad Eftekhar, and faculty member Nick Koudas (Database Systems).

THE CONCEPT: Intrigued with the recent popularity of Pinterest, and encouraged by Koudas and Eftekhar, Malit began to develop Peckalytics. Similar to other social network analysis tools that categorize virtual interactions, the aim of Peckalytics is to determine which Pinterest users are the ‘experts’ in a given category, and the ‘experts’ in turn, become potential influencers of a niche market. The purpose of the project was to gain more insights on how the SNA tool can be utilized by businesses to promote new viral marketing strategies through these ‘experts’.

Profile: Elizabeth

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@dcs

TESTING: Currently, Malit is in the process of programming. Testing will begin in early July. The process comprises of checking whether the final resulting signals are accurate, based on the information Malit retrieves from the database and comparing that with the data on Pinterest. What is challenging about this specific project is that website results change every day; thus, optimization is more difficult to test.

Elaine Malit hard at work on her summer research project.

FUTURE: While Peckalytics currently requires further testing, the research prototype provides information which strongly suggests the tool is effective. This project has the potential to influence the creation of new viral marketing strategies, targeting behavioral trends of consumers and utilizing influencers who have credibility within the Pinterest community for advertising purposes. Through additional programming and development effort, the analysis tool may serve as a new application allowing business operators to target influencers with customized promotions and other related programs, in order to improve customer retention. n

Patitsas, PhD student

CS produces cutting edge research and teaching, ranking as one of the best computer science departments in the world. One of the main reasons for our success is the quality of our teaching. This is what PhD student, Elizabeth Patitsas is passionate about: Computer Science Education (“CS Ed”).

CS Ed is a discipline that focuses on creating and promoting strategies that will enhance how computer science is taught. “I was drawn into CS Ed research for a number of reasons,” says Patitsas.

“I want to be a better educator and to be a contributing member of that research community.” Supervised by Steve Easterbrook and Michelle Craig, Patitsas asserts, “My supervisors have given me a great deal of autonomy over my work. They’re really great people and I’ve learned a lot from them.”

As with many branches of computer science, CS Ed is multidisciplinary: “A lot of

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HOW IT WORKS: Peckalytics calculates “signals”, which are numerical attributes like the number of followers per pin to determine the influencers of a given category. In order to calculate the signals, the tool uses Java to obtain relevant information from the JSON format, which requires a web crawler that extracts data from Pinterest. Once all the signals are calculated, testers will combine the signals to form scores for each user and the user’s board; from there, rankings are drawn in order of expertise (i.e., a user with a higher score is more of an expert/influencer than another with a lower score) in a given topic.

what I do, research-wise, is to bring perspectives from related fields. I explore theories and methods from fields such as social anthropology, physical anthropology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, math education, and physics education,” explains Patitsas. “CS Ed is a young field; it’s exciting because there is so much fertile ground to explore.” Some of Patitsas’s past research investigates TA training, development and support, with a focus on labbased teaching. She is also developing and evaluating instructional activities for labs, assignments, and in-class workbooks.

Patitsas’s current work looks at socialpsychological interventions in the classroom, as it relates to diversity in CS. She notes: “A lot of diversity initiatives in CS, despite being well-intended, can have counter-productive effects. They can single out women and other minorities, and that in turn can steer those

students away from CS. I’ll be looking at these issues and how we can effectively improve diversity in the field.”

Outside of her research, Patitsas founded the Social Studies of Computer Science Reading Group at DCS. This seminar group brings attention to the philosophy, history and sociology of computer science as a discipline. Topics include relevant epistemology and research ethics, CS’s role in society, and the organization and future of the discipline. Patitsas also contributes to the CS Education Reading Group, and she has helped run meetings in the past: “I enjoy the discussions; they’re quite thoughtprovoking and productive.”

Patitsas feels excited to be doing her graduate work at U of T. “The Social Studies of Computer Science Reading Group and the lively group of teaching faculty at DCS are among the reasons I chose to come to U of T to do my research,” says Patitsas. “The lecturers here are such a great group of people and I’m grateful to get to interact with them.” n

STUDENTS | undergraduate and graduate

Going Places

DCS Celebrates the 2013 Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award Winners

This past year’s class of graduates (MSc, MScAC, PhD) have moved on to places including:

(Left to right) Utkarsh Roy, Alice Li and Oloruntobi Ogunbiyi.

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raduate student Utkarsh Roy and undergraduate students Alice Li and Oloruntobi Ogunbiyi were proud recipients of the 2013 Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award. The Cressy is annually awarded to graduating University of Toronto students for their “outstanding contributions to improving the world around them and inspiring others to do the same.” DCS student winners accounted for over a quarter of the recipients honoured by the Faculty of Arts & Science.

These students have made a difference in the DCS community and beyond.

Utkarsh Roy was nominated for his many contributions to the university. In 2011, he represented U of T at the Festival of Thinkers in Abu Dhabi. He has served as an Executive Member for multiple U of T student service committees. At the department, Roy is a member of the DCS graduate student society and has volunteered for events such as Grad Visit day, where he has provided guidance to prospective students.

Alice Li was honoured for her dedication to bettering the DCS community in a number of ways. As a DCS First-Year Learning Communities’ student leader, she conducted activities and mentored first-year students. Li was also a member of the Computer Science Student Union, and volunteered for the Gr8 Girls program, encouraging young women to consider a future in computer science. Li has participated in video game showcase events such as Level Up, which exhibited coursework games to the GTA development community, and outside the department, Li has volunteered with the Psychology Student Association, SickKids and OISE

(coding for research projects).

Oloruntobi “Tobi” Ogunbiyi is a member of the African Students’ Association and the Centre for International Students Experience; he has mentored and provided support to new students coming to Canada, helping them get adjusted to university life. Ogunbiyi has been an active member of the First-Year Learning Communities program at the department, where he served as a peer mentor, demonstrating his leadership skills and encouraging students to become more involved in university life.

The department also celebrated Alexander Mann, who was nominated by Trinity College for a Gordon Cressy Award.

The department is very honoured to have these students represent DCS and the university.

Congratulations! n

• Antalya International University • A+ Learning Centre • Electronic Arts • Facebook, Inc. • Google Inc • Guardly Corp.

• Harvard University • Husky Injection Molding Systems • IBM • IBM Research • Info-Tech Research Group International • French National Institute for Agricultural Research

• Intrafinity Inc. • IQIC Inc. • LS Graphics • McMaster University • NetApp • Samsung Research • SickKids • Stanford University • SUNY Stony Brook University • The Jonah Group • Trapeze • Uken Games • University of Edinburgh

Some of our June 2013 MSc and MScAC graduates with Honorary Degree recipient Bill Buxton (front row, centre).

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T E ACH I NG

Video Game Design @ U of T: The university brings academia

and industry together to usher in the new era in gaming.

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t’s Thursday morning, and DCS students are playing with shadows, exploring deep seas, and coursing through neural cell structures.

The class is CSC404, the department’s capstone video game design course. Now in its sixth year, this course got its start thanks to a growing video game design industry, and the students who wanted to be part of it. In 2007, Toronto’s video game landscape was filled with small, independent design companies. Millions of Canadians owned a gaming console of some sort, and many students were enrolling in computer science in the hopes of making a game of their own.

To answer the call of students and industry alike, Senior Lecturer Steve Engels started a course in video game design for a class of 20 capstone students. Five years later, the video game design industry in Toronto has grown significantly, and the game design course has grown along with it, doubling in size with many more students waiting to get in. It is also a collaborative course, bringing together computer science students from UofT and art students from the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD U) to create joint projects that fuse the talents of both schools. The course now culminates in an end-of-term showcase event called Level Up, where the students exhibit their finished products to nearly a thousand people over the course of a single night.

This event, first created by Engels and his OCAD U counterpart Emma Westecott, is now Toronto’s premiere event for showcasing student talent in game design, and most recently featured 65 projects from 12 different colleges and universities across Ontario.

New courses have been created since CSC404, including a first-year gaming seminar course (PMU199), aimed at non-CS majors, and a second-year Research Opportunity Program course (CSC299), where students create games to improve the cognitive abilities in seniors. All of these game design courses offer

Students show off their games to industry and fellow students at Level Up 2013.

Miguel Sternberg (L), Spooky Squid Games’ CEO, on campus in February to meet with CSC404 game design students.

students and industry a unique opportunity to connect. Designers and producers, from companies such as EA, Ubisoft, Zynga and Microsoft, are regularly visiting classes to give talks, recruit employees, critique the students’ games and give students a realistic sense of what careers in the gaming industry are like.

Thanks to curricular innovation like this, DCS students and faculty are becoming known in the community for their research and de-

To learn more about video game design at DCS, check out the following: • UT Game Design and Development Club: www.utgddc.com • DCS Focus on Game Design: web.cs.toronto.edu/program/ugrad/programs/Game_Design.htm • Technologies for Aging Gracefully: taglab.ca • Dynamic Graphics Project: www.dgp.toronto.edu

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velopment in game design. The University of Toronto’s student-run Game Design and Development Club (UTGDDC) is celebrating its tenth year of running popular game design competitions using “deathmatch” gameplay, and DCS’ Computer Science Student Union (CSSU) runs two overnight gaming sessions each year that draw in hundreds of students from all over campus. The students also create exhibits for community events such as Nuit Blanche, Gamercamp, Digifest and many more.

Organizations such as the Ontario Science Centre and the Royal Ontario Museum have even reached out to have the department’s student teams create games for their exhibits. DCS game designers have appeared in the media as well, with stories this past year in the National Post, the Space Channel and G4TV. “Canada is the largest producer of video games on a per capita basis worldwide and the local industry is a source of national pride,” XMG Studio Inc. President Ray Sharma notes.

“The University of Toronto has been tremendously influential to this success and has trained the best and brightest with invaluable mobile engineering experience. These graduates are forming the foundation of a new generation of video game entrepreneurs.” Clearly, the future

holds great promise for students and faculty working in video game design, and DCS continues to respond to the demand. More recently, the department created program “Focuses” at the undergraduate level, making it easier for students to concentrate on a particular area of CS; while pursuing their degree, students now have the option to complete a Focus in Video Game Design.

One should note that Engels and his colleagues across the university are also engaging in research and development in game design, working on games for the blind, games for education and games that help seniors maintain and develop their cognitive skills. This research is taking place in the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lag (TAGLab), the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) lab, and under crossappointed faculty in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering.

With exciting courses, strong connections to industry and important research that brings gaming far beyond its traditional boundaries, the department has more than risen to the challenge, becoming a catalyst for modern video gaming in the City of Toronto, and beyond. n

Steve Engels keeps his fingers on the pulse of gaming in Toronto.

(Left to right) Harrison Dahme, Alice Li and Alex Smithers.

Checking in with Some of Our Gaming Grads Name: Harrison Dahme Degree, Year: BSc, Computer Science Specialty (AI) and Mathematics Minor, 2012 Title: Senior Software Engineer, Internationalization Company/Employer: Zynga

What do you love about your job?

I’m the only engineer working on a large piece of infrastructure which will make all human-language related tasks at Zynga easier, faster, better and cheaper for translators as well as game teams. I love the total freedom I get to design and build, using a wide range of interesting technologies. I’ve come to own the whole system, and my department respects me for that. The people I’m surrounded by are incredibly smart and talented. Also, the office perks – like free massages and 3 meals a day – are pretty good, too.

What experience at DCS stands out (having made a positive impact on your current career)? The end-of-year design projects in CSC411: Machine Learning and Data Mining and CSC404. They were one of the first times we were given a problem and an unrestricted toolbox to solve it as best we could. Often in school assignments, there are limitations on what we can use and how we’re supposed to go about solving something. There’s rarely an open question with many valid answers. Both of these courses allowed me to have freedom, right from the planning stages. This experience

was invaluable when I designed and built the next-level Zynga content-management/ translation infrastructure. In CSC404, I learned how to clearly communicate with people from various disciplines. Also, there was no other time in my education at DCS where the code was incidental to the success of the final product, yet such is the way of the real world. Learning to shift the emphasis from code quality to design quality positively impacted my ability to see how the work I do fits into the product as a whole, as well as taught me how to budget time and effort to be more constructive for the scope of a project. That’s also why our game, Gentleman Explorer, performed so well at Level Up 2012!

What is your favourite video game to play in your free time? To be honest, making games has impacted my ability to enjoy them. I spend so much time looking at a screen at work, that I don’t want to do it when I go home. Besides, California is beautiful, and it’d be a total waste to spend free time indoors. I’ve become a pretty active hiker, biker and climber! When I do play, I can see the game design/mechanical decisions and have an understanding of why I enjoy it, this dispels the magic I once saw in video games. The game I play most is Half Life Episodes 1 & 2, solely for the developer commentary. It’s fascinating to see how Valve designs games, and the amount of thought they put into it (again emphasizing code quality vs. design quality).

(continued on page 14)

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COVER STORY

From Instinct to Evidence: Research on Inverted Teaching

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ennifer Campbell and Paul Gries are well known for their highly successful Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (see sidebar on this page). The opportunity to teach introductory programming to the world was extraordinary, but the senior lecturers were motivated even more by the idea of using materials developed for their MOOCs to enhance our introductory course here at U of T. Gries and Campbell completely “inverted” the course: students prepared for class by watching videos and doing online exercises, and then applied what they’d learned, solving problems in class. “With programming, you have to learn by doing,” Campbell notes. “We’ve always had labs, exercises and assignments for this, but inverted lectures take it a level further: students practise programming right in class, with their instructor and TAs on hand to help.”

The professor benefits, too. “I knew immediately what concepts people weren’t understanding − not in office hours later that week, or when marking the midterm,” commented Campbell. In one early lecture, students drew diagrams to represent what happens as a variable x is assigned 15 and then 27. “Many drew two different variables called x! This was a total surprise.” Because students were doing the work right in front of her, she could address the misconception immediately.

The goal is to improve student success through the inverted approach. Campbell and Gries are working with colleagues Michelle Craig and Diane Horton to examine the evidence rigorously. Gries is an acclaimed teacher, the winner of numerous awards including the U of T President’s Teaching Award. With that much success, why is formal research important – what’s wrong with basing your teaching on instinct? Gries is quick to answer: “Confirmation bias – the risk that we’ll only see what we want to see. And you have to remember that, just because students like what you’re doing, doesn’t mean it’s effective!”

Horton inverted the third-year database course a little differently. “I wanted to try inverting the marking scheme also, by giving marks for the lecture preparation and in-class activities instead of traditional assignments.”

When an assignment is entirely for learning and marks are taken out of the equation, (continued on page 14)

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(Clockwise, starting on the upper right) Michelle Craig, Jennifer Campbell, Diane Horton and Paul Gries.

Gries and Campbell Teach the University of Toronto’s Largest Class Ever Last summer, U of T joined Coursera (www.coursera.com), a consortium of top universities offering free classes online.

The university’s first foray into MOOCs caught the attention of the world – and Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries’ offering, “Learn to Program: The Fundamentals,” had over 82,000 students registered to take the course together. Materials from the course are still available on the Coursera site, there are currently almost 140,000 people enrolled for “Learn to Program.”

The university offered five courses through Coursera for the first year: three from the Department of Computer Science, one from the Faculty of Social Work, and one from OISE. Using the Coursera platform, Campbell and Gries created many online

videos for their two MOOCs, each lasting from five to 15 minutes and enhanced with quizzes to verify student understanding.

The free courses have offered people everywhere access to computer science education from one of the best departments in the world. Campbell and Gries’ MOOC students have come from places as far as rural Asia and Africa, and even included a 15-yearold Boy Scout from the U.S., who contacted the instructors after the course finished, so he could confirm that he had completed the requirements for his merit badge. The external response was exciting, and now Campbell and Gries are taking advantage of their MOOC materials to enhance the educational experience for students at the U of T. (See the accompanying article.) n

RESEARCH

Computational Vision: This Research Group Draws on

Interdisciplinary Roots to Explore One of Our Greatest Physical Gifts

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he Computational Vision (CV) research group explores the fundamental question, “how do we see?” This doesn’t mean the physiological process of seeing – how rods and cones detect light to produce a signal to the brain – but the process of understanding this information. For example, we need to identify an object, and then recognize where it is in relation to the other objects in the same environment. @dcs spoke to group members Sven Dickinson, David Fleet, Allan Jepson, and Kyros Kutulakos about computational vision at the University of Toronto.

“People have a hard time understanding the extent of the problem – because it is so easy for humans to just see an object,” Jepson notes.

Fleet agrees: “Much of vision happens so effortlessly that we take it for granted. For example, when you drive home, you are interpreting stoplights and other drivers, often on an involuntary level. It’s often only when we experience problems with vision that we appreciate what an important physical gift it is.” The CV group pursues interdisciplinary research that draws on many topics, including the other core subdisciplines in DCS’ AI group (machine learning, computational linguistics, and knowledge representation), graphics and HCI, numerical analysis, algorithms, psychology, neuroscience and physics.

It is for this reason that it is such an advantage to be at U of T: “DCS is home to one of the strongest AI groups in the world,” Jepson observes. “Not to mention the strengths in graphics,” adds Dickinson. “The strength of the department’s whole research enterprise is a great advantage.”

PhD student Matthew O’Toole describes this combination of areas as a major bonus: “The research done by computational vision falls within the intersection of my four favourite topics in computer science: vision, graphics, learning, and optics.” O’Toole is working on the emerging field of computational photography, in which new hardware and software are joined to extend the capabilities of traditional digital cameras. “By adding computation along with specialized sensors, unconventional optics and controlled lighting, photographers can photo-realistically change the focus or lighting of a photo after it has been taken, produce high-quality images in a

(Left to right) Allan Jepson, Sven Dickinson, Kyros Kutulakos, and David Fleet.

low-light environment, or capture geometry or material properties for use in films and video games.” (See O’Toole’s research highlight on page 15.)

Computational vision work is not only leading the way to new and improved cameras. It is also contributing to the creation of self-driving cars, image search engines, image-guided surgery, smart cameras, assistive-living technology, and archeological visualization, to name just a few examples. “One of the strengths of our vision group is the breadth of our research,” observes Dickinson. “We are offering our students the opportunity to pursue research in a range of fundamental topics, such as geometric reconstruction, computational photography, motion analysis, perceptual grouping, discrete and geometric algorithms, and object recognition, and in applications including smart cameras, visual aids for the disabled, image annotation, medicine, space robotics, and human activity analysis.”

Jepson is excited about where computational vision is at now: “The field has matured to a point where there are many opportunities

for talented, educated people in CV. There is a huge demand for good people in industry.”

Graduates from the group have gone on to a variety of places: small vision companies, hospitals – even startups. Graduate Shahzad Malik created a company, CognoVision, which was acquired by Intel in 2010. Reflecting on his time at DCS, Malik remarks, “One of the things I found to be really helpful was the ability to cross-collaborate with other research groups. I think DCS makes such collaborations easy since we’ve got a breadth of faculty members in pretty much every major research area in Computer Science – which is pretty rare.”

Fleet considers what drew him to computational vision: “When I first entered the field, I felt like the area’s problems were so complex that I’d have a job for life.” He chuckles and continues, “But I have been stunned by the success I’ve seen. Our work has led to viable technologies that are making an impact.” He continues: “Vision is an exquisite sense, one of the biggest scientific mysteries. Trying to uncover how it happens? That’s what amuses us.” n (Research highlights on page 15)

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Corporate Telepathy: Granata Decision Systems Offers Companies Superior Marketing Resource Management

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n the fall of 2012, computer science faculty member Craig Boutilier and PhD candidate Tyler Lu incorporated Granata Decision Systems (www.granatads.com), a company that provides software which allows organizations to maximize the value of their marketing data and infrastructure effectively and quickly. Granata is currently in transition from the University of Toronto Early Stage Technology (UTEST) offices in the MaRS heritage building to the new U of T incubator space in the Banting Building. They have 3 patents pending (and several more under development), a team of 4, and have been using the last 9 months to engage with clients and hone their product offerings to meet the needs of their customers. The team was part of the original UTEST cohort, getting seed funding from MaRS Innovation and the Ontario Centres of Excellence. (UTEST is a campus incubator, a joint initiative offered by U of T and commercialization partner MaRS Innovation.)

Granata was born out of research efforts which naturally led to the creation of an exciting marketing tool. “This really started because we were thinking about voting,” explains Boutilier. “Throughout the history of [political] voting systems, there is always a general feeling that the process isn’t necessarily genuine. We were motivated to discover ways to get better results, more easily, through different sorts of group-choice scenarios.” The researchers started by building a little demo to get data, an adaptive survey so they could test their algorithm on the resulting information; Craig and Tyler initially sought outside interest to further their research. “Our initial concern was, ‘how can we get data for our research?’” Boutilier notes. “We just wanted to get people to use the web service we developed – something like the online scheduler, Doodle, but more sophisticated.”

Once it became apparent that their work had real commercial value, the research team became even more excited about the possibilities. “We want to see our research out of the lab,” enthuses Boutilier. Lu concurs: “We want to see this play out in the real world, and help organizations make more efficient decisions.” While their initial work was designed to help with basic group decision-making scenarios, they discovered that their algorithms have major marketing implications as they

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Boutilier and Lu in their first offices in the MaRS building.

engaged with the business community to trial applications of their technologies. Granata refined and positioned their techniques to help large brands make smarter decisions about where they are spending their marketing dollars – streamlining their marketing efforts to contact their customers in the most effective way, save money, and dramatically reduce “over-contacting” (so that customers will end up getting fewer irrelevant offers). The key to their success has been significant algorithmic breakthroughs that allow optimization (making the best decisions) across the entire portfolio of offers or marketing campaigns. Their products are also ideally suited to “marketing service providers” such as loyalty programs, large online marketplaces, and others. Their technologies can also be used to assess consumer preferences – retailers can, for example, start to influence their client base with more compelling incentives and discounts.

When asked about the biggest challenges bringing their research forward, Boutilier shares that it is simply, “Getting access to real data and proving the value of what you can provide across a wide range of businesses.” He acknowledges that it took a little while to identify the potential applications of Granata’s technologies; Boutilier explains, “We have a very broad suite

of technologies that are generic at an abstract level. We have had to be very aware of the needs in the consumer space in order to figure out where to focus our attention.” In fact, Craig and Tyler have designed Granata’s software to be flexible, so it can be plugged into different situations, despite their current focus on marketing applications.

While there are no business partnerships that the team can talk about publicly, Granata has been working with a number of clients on exciting projects and trials. It’s clear that the potential for Granata’s technology is huge; as Tyler reinforces, “We are the engine that provides information based on preferences.”

It’s essentially the technological equivalent to “reading people’s minds.” And this “telepathy” is not only fantastic for companies, but great news for consumers – we should all be happier with products and opportunities that are practically customized for us.

Needless to say, things are exciting and very busy at Granata, and one must keep in mind that Lu and Boutilier have been doing this in addition to their academic work. It’s not surprising to hear that, when asked what it’s like to start a company, Boutilier admits somewhat wryly, “It’s much less glamorous than people think.” n

F a c u lty & S ta ff

Profile: Jim

Clarke, Retiring after 35 years at the University of Toronto

Q: What do you like the most about the field of Computer Science?

A: You get to make machines do stuff that you think up. That makes the thinking more directed and more fun. And these days, you get to carry the machines around with you.

Q: What has made DCS special for you?

A: The people. The faculty, the students, the staff – especially the staff in the Undergraduate Office, who have saved my bacon more times than I can possibly remember.

Q: What project (teaching or research) have you enjoyed working on the most?

A: I’m not really a “big-project” kind of person; “keep-it-going” is more my style. But it’s been wonderful to be part of the community of lecturers, which appeared under Eugene Fiume’s guidance as chair. The new people joined the few of us who were already here, and we created a group that lives so well together that com-

ing to “work” is a joy, and I think I was part of that growing together.

Q: Who has had the most impact on you during your career here?

A: Allan Borodin, who was the department chair when I started – tied with Margaret Chepely, who was the first “bacon-saver” in the Undergraduate Office.

Apart from those influences during my early injudicious phase, there have been lots of others, of course. However, taking a while to think about this a little more, I’ve realized there’s been influence from a direction you hardly ever hear about: my TAs. Faculty often grumble about TA support, but given a population of intelligent, responsible graduate (and undergraduate!) students who are often dedicated teachers, it’s not too surprising that I’ve learned things from TAs – ideas, work habits,

Staff Q&A Joseph Raghubar | Special Projects Coordinator Q: What is your favourite part about your job?

A: I’m very fortunate to be in a position that allows me various opportunities to interact with our faculty, students, and my fellow staff members across the department. To have that chance is very unique and gratifying. My most fulfilling experiences are assisting in the execution of our different departmental events, like the annual Research In Action showcase, which allows our researchers the opportunity to showcase their hard work to the public.

Q: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

A: I love spending time with my family and working on home improvement projects around the house. I also enjoy finding great ‘cruise deals’ and flights to Florida for any family vacations.

Ange Glinos | CDF System Administrator & Supervisor Q: What is your favourite part about your job?

A: My favourite part of my job is helping students. I look forward to September every year. It brings excitement on campus with new and familiar faces. Best of all, CDF spends the summer getting the labs ready with hardware and software updates. It is rewarding for me to have students try out all the changes in the fall.

Q: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

A: I love to spend time with family. The holidays are exciting, filled with family get-togethers, entertaining, decorating and of course lots and lots of cooking. I also enjoy gardening, watching movies, listening to music and going for walks in the Rouge Valley. n

general outlook – that have improved not only my teaching but my approach to life.

Q: What was your favourite course to teach?

A: Um, um, CSC108 (Introduction to Computer Programming), I guess, in various forms. Most recently I got to teach it under its pseudonym of “CSC120” (Computer Science for the Sciences).

The now-vanished 270 (Fundamental Data Structures and Techniques) was good, too.

Q: What accomplishment to date are you the most proud about?

A: In the 1980s, I needed to allocate students to courses, in that earlier era of over-enrolment. Somehow, I didn’t drop the ball.

More recently, it’s been good to be part of a general movement toward loosening those controls now that we no longer needed them.

(Sadly, we’re about to need them again.) At the same time, we were able to liberate our undergraduate programs from requirements that had become a little too rigid. Our programs aren’t weakened now but more flexible, and all kinds of people have worked hard on that. I was happy to play a role in it.

Q: What are your hobbies?

A: Hobbies? I’ll have to find some now, I guess.

Q: What are your plans after DCS? A: See under “hobbies”. I don’t plan to leave Toronto (I’d have to get divorced first if I even wanted to), but beyond that, everything that has started to look like a “plan” so far has fallen apart. We’ll see where life leads us.

Q: What is your fondest memory of DCS? A: Coffee with the lecturers. Though I once left early because of an interminable discussion of knitting, and have never been allowed to forget it, really my colleagues are reliably informative and supportive.

Q: What will you miss most about leaving DCS? A: You mean, “What will you miss most about DCS after you leave?”, and the answer is, pickily correcting other people’s prose.

The people. What a fine bunch we are.

You are. n

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Profile: Ron

Baecker Reflects on 40 Years at the Department

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y career at DCS has been a rich and rewarding one. I arrived in 1972 to replace Les Mezei for a year as he took a sabbatical. I was welcomed warmly by Tom Hull and others, enjoyed the urban lifestyle of Toronto in the early 70s, and decided to stay. Dennis Tsichritzis and I wrote a successful grant proposal, and ordered a PDP-11/45 (an early minicomputer) and an early copy of a new operating system called UNIX. With the help of an amazing vector display called the Graphic Wonder, obtained from a CMU spinoff, and the convergence of a talented group of students, anchored by Bill Reeves, Bill Buxton, Mike Tilson, David Tilbrook, Tom Horsley, Rob Pike, and others, the graphics lab morphed into the Dynamic Graphics Project. And dynamic we were, building interactive systems for musical composition and performance, newspaper page layout systems, simulations of urban traffic flow, graphical debugging environments, and numerous other manifestations of J. C. R. Licklider’s concept of human-computer symbiosis.

My career has taken many twists and turns since then. I moved from computer graphics to human-computer interaction (HCI) once it

DCS Awards Highlights Canadian Digital Pioneer Award, GRAND, 2013 Ronald Baecker (Faculty) Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, NSERC, 2013 Stephen Cook (Faculty) Order of Ontario, 2013 Stephen Cook (Faculty) Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize, CAC/AIC, 2013 Eyal de Lara (Faculty) Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, 2013 Stephen Cook, Michelle Craig, C.C. (Kelly) Gotlieb, J.N. Patterson Hume (Faculty) Sloan Research Fellowships, 2013 Bianca Schroeder, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Russ Salakhutdinov (Faculty) University of Toronto Excellence Through Innovation Award, 2012 John Hancock, Joseph Raghubar (Staff) For more awards, see the departmental webpage: www.cs.toronto.edu/dcs/awards

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became clear there was such a field, and dabbled in multimedia and in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and learning.

My computer-animated teaching film, Sorting Out Sorting, helped to start the disciplines of software visualization and program animation. I have been involved in 4 start-ups, and ran two myself, resulting in my once resigning a tenured position and having to be rehired and re-tenured.

(Warning: Do not try this at home, as my partner Lil says it is like getting a vasectomy reversed.) I’ve written many papers and articles, wrote or edited four books, and have given talks across 4 continents. I’ve started numerous courses in interactive graphics, computer animation, HCI, CSCW, the business of software, and even assistive technology for seniors.

Perhaps most gratifying has been working with some unbelievably capable and creative students, including many whose academic or research or business careers have far surpassed mine. Most amazing in this regard is the “double bill” that just happened this June,

in which ex-students Bill Reeves and Bill Buxton were awarded honorary doctorates from UofT in the same convocation year!

And because of the productivity of Buxton and some of his students and some of their students’ students, and of some of the students of their student’s students, most of the recent candidates for HCI faculty positions in our department have been academic descendants of Les and myself.

Computer Science has many challenges.

Is it a discipline or a synergistic collection of overlapping research spheres? (I believe the latter, and also that we should have our own Faculty, comprising at least our department, the U of T’s current i-School, the Knowledge Media & Design Institute, and the Identity, Privacty & Security Institute.) Can we educate students in the craft of software development and the mathematics of computation, in working with large systems and in working with and for human users of systems? How do we ensure that our students possess written, (continued on page 15)

ALUMN I

Konrad Group Establishes Undergraduate

Scholarship at DCS

T

“I had a great experience at the U his spring, the department of T as a student… this is just a was thrilled to celebrate small way to give back to U of T a the creation of its newest part of what it has given me.” scholarship, The Konrad Group Karen Reid, Associate Chair of Scholarship in Computer Science.

Undergraduate Studies, comment$2,500 will be given annually to an ed, “It is incredibly motivating for upper-year undergraduate comour students to have a role model puter science student who “demBahador, like Hooman. Not only will the onstrates creativity and innova- Hooman CTO and Co-founder Konrad scholarship ease the fition with respect to the field of of Konrad Group nancial burden for a student every technology.” The donor, Konrad Group, is a rapidly-growing consulting and year, but since he graduated, Hooman has taken proprietary mobile, web, and social application a number of opportunities to mentor our students. His professional success, coupled with his development company.

“I am very passionate about promoting generosity to the department, is very inspiring.”

The Konrad Group Scholarship will be computer science education,” DCS graduate and Konrad co-founder Hooman Bahador said. given for the first time this coming fall. n

ALUMNI

Profile: Teresa

Almeida, Hons. BSc 2003, Senior Manager, Dymaxium Inc.

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eresa Almeida feels privileged to be able to pass on her knowledge to current undergraduate students. The alumna participated as a panelist in DCS’ first Alumni Panel Discussion for students on “How to Interview for Jobs in Computing”, held last October. She has also mentored students for a number of years in the department’s Mentorship program. From Almeida’s perspective, successful students come from institutions that are able to offer beneficial experiences. “When I was an undergrad, I found the resources available to me incredibly valuable,” asserts Almeida. “The more support a student has, the more it helps their future. Students will graduate well-prepared to be successful in their careers.”

Currently, Almeida is a Senior Manager of the Platform Development Unit for Dymaxium Inc. The company specializes in creating in-

novative software platforms for pharmaceutical and biotechnology manufacturers. “I lead the team working on our key software platform product, which focuses on health care decisionmaking specific to the US market,” Almeida explains. “Enhancing our existing product has been an interesting experience for me.”

In this role, Almeida has had the opportunity to work with people in multiple disciplines: “I’ve worked very closely with legal, marketing and research teams, and I enjoy the exposure to all the new knowledge without having to steer away from the development/IT side.”

Computers have always fascinated Almeida; as a child growing up in Ecuador, she was interested in computer engineering, especially software engineering for gaming. “When I was in high school in Ecuador, there were very few schools that offered computer science. Luck-

ily, I was able to go to a school that offered it. I fell in love with programming and I wanted to learn even more.”

Almeida has definitely come a long way to pursue her passion. As an undergrad at DCS, she specialized in Information Systems. “The days and nights at the lab are some of my fondest memories. In fact, I met my best friend while waiting in line for an available computer,” remembers Almeida. “They may have been very stressful days, but I didn’t just gain knowledge, I made strong friendships.”

After her undergrad studies, Almeida continues to expand her learning experience, earning a Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate, and an Information Technology Infrastructure Library certificate (ITIL).

DCS has been fortunate to have someone like Almeida who, in addition to her professional and personal commitments, has been very involved with the department. The IT (continued on page 15)

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currying out for Chinese food at 2 a.m. in the morning, a late night break from the coding and cramming in the computer labs at the Bahen Centre. Curiously enough, this is Ian Chan’s fondest memory as a student at DCS. (Ed.’s note: And yes, Ian – the New Ho King restaurant is still on Spadina Avenue, right where you left it 4 years ago.)

Now a Senior Engineer at Twitter in San Francisco California, Chan leads a small production team for one of the world’s social media giants. “The most interesting – and challenging – thing about working for such a widely used service is that the smallest change can have an immediate effect on millions of people.” explains Chan. “Every engineer here is aware of that.”

Chan recalls feeling anxious about submitting course work in university, distressed about what his professors or TA’s might think, but today his work can be seen by millions. “I see news reports and TV shows where they’re using Twitter, and sometimes I see features that I worked on directly. It can be amazing and terrifying at the same time.” Despite those moments of anxiety, Chan loves what he does: “We’re supporting

a service with an absolutely fascinating dataset and potential. The people I work with absolutely love the technology; everyone gets how things are supposed to work, and we are excited to find new ways to improve.”

Although Chan has found success very early on in his career, he admits that there were a few barriers he had to conquer. One of them was taking risks. “There were a few moments that changed my life forever – turning down a cushy desk job to join a local startup when I graduated is one, and moving to California is another,” says Chan. “These risks put me miles ahead. In retrospect, they were obvious decisions, but at the time they seemed like longshots.”

Another obstacle was feeling intimidated.

Chan advises students entering the work force to overcome what he calls the “imposter syndrome.” “One of the biggest hurdles I see new grads struggling with is the fear that they don’t have the required skills needed for industry,” says Chan. “There is this misconception that everyone is supposed to know everything in the tech industry. When I first started working, I was always terrified that a senior engineer

©Photo by Jay (WhoJedi) Newnum for WSOP

Profile: Ian Chan, Hons. BSc 2009, Senior Engineer, Twitter

would ‘call me out,’ and reveal some bit of technology that I didn’t know, much to my embarrassment. Of course, this never happened.”

Chan advises students to focus on their ability and willingness to learn new skills, as this is a key trait that employers value.

While Chan is a busy man, he still has time for hobbies. “I played a lot of poker in university, and I still play with friends and people I meet.” In 2012, Chan competed in the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas, where he placed 14th out of more than 3,200 players.

“I’ve found poker to be a good way to keep my mind sharp and my wallet full.” It seems that there is no stopping this astute alum. n

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Checking in with Some of Our Gaming Grads (continued from page 7) Name: Alice Li Degree: Hons. BSc, Double Major in

Name: Alex Smithers Degree: BSc Specialist in Computer Science,

Computer Science and Psychology Title: Level Scripter Company/Employer: Ubisoft Toronto

Minor in Physics Title: Programmer

What do you love about your job?

Being a level scripter means that I am responsible for creating the transition between gameplay and the cutscenes and making sure that the various aspects of the cinematics play out as required. My favourite part of the job is testing my work and being able to see the effect of the work that I have done integrated with everything else in the game.

What do you love about your job? Being a small studio (less than 15 people), I feel like I get to do something different every day, and have touched elements of our game ranging from the code, to the audio, to the story, to the concept and to the level design.

On top of that, the studio is an intimate environment with good leadership and adept employees.

What experience at DCS stands out (having made a positive impact on your current career)? Taking part in the project

What experience at DCS stands out (having made a positive impact on your current career)? Taking Steve Engels’ game

courses offered at UofT definitely helped me the most to get the experience I needed to apply for jobs. I think what really helped me get my position within the games industry was taking CSC404 and showcasing our game at the level up event. It was a great way to gain exposure with recruiters and people in the industry.

design course was certainly a boon towards preparing me for the real world. I found so much of my degree was dedicated to theoretical thinking, which is interesting and mind-expanding, but rarely used by me, day to day. In contrast, working in a group to deliver on a game and navigating all the resulting complexities is almost identical to what I do every day work.

What is your favourite video game to play in your free time? Having worked in the games industry for almost a year now, I have learned that it’s both very challenging and very rewarding. I still enjoy gaming in my spare time and my favourite game at the moment is Bioshock Infinite.

Company/Employer: DrinkBox Studios

What is your favourite video game to play in your free time? Defense of the Ancients. n

From Instinct to Evidence (continued from page 8)

students can focus on the parts that help them learn and can work in any groupings they find productive. Horton and Campbell are now studying the results. “We’d like to know whether students benefit from this freedom. How much do they learn and how much effort does it require from them under this approach, compared to a more traditional teaching approach?”

“I knew immediately what concepts people weren’t understanding – not in office hours later that week, or when marking the midterm.”

Campbell, Craig, Gries and Horton are members of the dynamic Lecturer group. With its focus on the undergraduate experience, the group has helped propel the department forward in curriculum, pedagogy, technologies for teaching, and co-curricular activities for students.

The Lecturer group at U of T has also grown in prominence on the international landscape.

“At first, we were publishing experience reports,” notes Craig. “And a number of our assignments have been included in the highly popular ‘Nifty Assignments’ panel at SIGCSE, the premier conference on CS education.” One of Craig’s “Nifties” has been used at universities on nearly every continent. “Now we’re also publishing research that backs up our intuition with evidence. It’s exciting to share what we’ve learned.” n

Giving to DCS: I would like to contribute $ _________ to the Computer Science Excellence Fund.

Gifts to this project are used in the areas of greatest need, supporting student activities such as the Student Mentorship Program, special seminars and the First-Year Learning Communities program.

For more information, contact us at dcs-donations@cs.toronto.edu Or visit donate.utoronto.ca/computerscience Charitable Reg. BN 108162330-RR001 | Solicitation Code 0570045505 | Computer Science Excellence Fund 0560001581

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Please send this form with your donation and full contact information to: Annual Fund Office 21 King’s College Circle Toronto, ON M5S 3J3

Computational Vision Research Highlights

A

B

(see main story on pg. 9) initial triangle soup

Object Categorization (A) Sven Dickinson’s research revolves around the problem of object categorization, beginning with the question: how do we represent an object category? While our community has agreed that objects should be represented in terms of their constituent parts, there is little agreement on what a part is. For almost 100 years, human vision researchers have studied how the regularities of our physical world have shaped our visual system. For example, the ubiquity of symmetry in our world has led to mechanisms that can quickly detect symmetry in an image. Dickinson’s recent research has explored how a model of symmetry “learned” from natural training examples can be used to detect the symmetric parts that make up an object. If such parts can be grouped together, the resulting structure can be used to “query” a database of shape models to identify the object. In the image shown (from Alex Levinshtein’s thesis), the parts of the swimmer (and lower body of a second person) are detected and correctly grouped (by colour), even though the system has no knowledge of humans or their structure.

Modeling Human Motion One of the projects on which David Fleet has worked for several years concerns the modeling of human motion for animation and video-based human pose tracking. Human pose tracking refers to the estimation of 3D human pose and motion from monocular video. This is often done using model-based methods in which prior knowledge of human shape and motion are used to help constrain the image analysis. They have recently begun to consider the use of Newtonian models for understanding the motion of people and their interactions with the environment from physical and bio-mechanical principles.

Computational Light Transport PhD student Matthew O’Toole and Kyros Kutulakos are studying the capture and manipulation of light paths. They are currently exploring a new imaging regime for photography called primal-dual coding that enables direct fine-grain control over which light paths contribute to a photo, with applications that

after computing after computing depth flips relative depths

include imaging through fog or rain, recording light that scatters through skin, and colouring objects based on their depth.

Non-Rigid Structure from Motion (B) Allan Jepson, Kyros Kutulakos, and PhD student Jonathan Taylor consider non-rigidly moving objects, such as the newspaper shown, which is in the process of being torn in half. They would like to be able to recover the 3D shape and the change in the topology of the newspaper.

Given an image sequence, a set of points are then tracked (so the tracked points move with the image structure). Given these tracks the “structure from motion problem” is to identify differently moving objects and, if possible, estimate their 3D shapes. The structure from motion problem has been thoroughly studied in the literature for some types of scenes, namely scenes consisting of a single rigid object (equivalently, a stationary scene and a moving camera), or multiple rigid objects. However, recovering the 3D shape of flexible objects has received less attention. n

Ron Baecker

Teresa Almeida

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oral, and interpersonal communication skills, and also knowledge of the world and its history and culture? This is challenging because the concept of a liberal education seems to be an idea of the past, and we are overrun with specialization and with the apparent need to know increasing amounts of technique.

How do we ensure that we do not all work ourselves to death via rote re-enactments of endless cycles of grant applications and paper submissions followed by acceptance and repeated rejection? Are we still having fun?

I have not always felt that my work has been understood, but I have always appreciated the

respect and collegiality of this department, and especially the support of chairs Derek, Eugene, Craig, and Sven. I have made many friends, although likely not as many as would have been possible had I played hockey. I am delighted that my commitment to and pleasure from my new line of research in the Technologies for Aging Gracefully lab (TAGlab) should keep me busy for many years in my new life as a senior citizen on a pension working 3 to 3.5 days a week. Please come visit us in TAGLab on Bahen 7th floor, or come and see Lil and me during the darkest days of winter in our part-time southern office in Key West. n

professional advises the new crop of DCS students: “Do not minimize your school work!

The high quality work students are putting into their school assignments counts as experience. It can be showcased when applying for a new job, especially if you have not had any previous job experience.” Almeida also recommends that student use all available activities and resources at the university. “I gave intramural soccer a try during my undergrad years, and though I got knocked on the ground, I loved playing the game. Before that time, I had only watched it on TV, but I’m a sports enthusiast and it was a great experience!” n

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l ife at d c s

In Focus

1

2

3

4

5

1 PhD student Joanna Drummond fields questions at Research in Action this April. 2 Arbor Award winner Michael McCarthy, right and Sven Dickinson, left.

3 2013 Honorary Degree recipient and alumnus Bill Reeves (MSc 1976, PhD 1980) talks about his career at Pixar Animation Studios during a student roundtable.* 4 Students from all over U of T line up for CSSU’s popular annual Game Night. 5 Some Take your Kids to Work Day visitors check out the “toys” in the Centre for Collaborative Interactive Digital Media lab. *See pg. 5 for a picture of students with our other honorary degree recipient, Bill Buxton.

DCS in the Media:

A selected list of big stories from the past year.

• International Business Times UK (April 2013) article on “Minuum: The Smart Keyboard With Google Glass in its Sights” – A fundraising success story. Minuum was developed by Engineering student Will Walmsley and DCS’ Prof. Khai Truong and recent MSc graduate Xavier Snelgrove, and received $80,000 in donations via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

• Wired (March 2013) article on “Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning” – DCS’ Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and recent PhD graduates Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever created the startup DNNResearch, which was acquired

by Google; all three researchers have been

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hired by Google as a part of the deal. Hinton will be a part-time employee, splitting his time between Google and the University of Toronto.

• U of T News (March 2013) article on “U of T undergraduate entrepreneurs sell web services startup” - undergraduate students Fahd Ananta (DCS), Guru Mahendran (Engineering) and Thariq Shihipar (Engineering) created Chime, a web aggregator, which was acquired by HubSpot earlier this year; the team will be moving to HubSpot’s headquarters in Boston this summer.

• U of T News (September 2012) article on “New research: how data centres can save

(Left to right) Recent PhD graduates Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky and DCS’ Prof. Geoffrey Hinton.

energy” featured Prof. Bianca Schroeder and her research on how minor temperature adjustments could end up saving energydraining data centres money. n

For links to the full stories and more, visit cs.toronto.edu/dcs/news/media2.htm