goFredX - Inspiring Innovation
Speakers
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Ali Ghorbani
Dean, Faculty of Computer Science UNB
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Cosmin Munteanu
Research Officer,
National Research Council -
Kevin Englehart
Associate Director, Institute of Biomedical Engineering
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Mark Masry
Manager R&D, CARIS
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Maurice Gallant
CEO GoFred Networks, Comnet Inc
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Sandy Bird
Co-Founder & CTO, Q1 Labs
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Scott Buffett
Research Officer,
National Research Council -
William McIver
Senior Research Officer,
National Research Council
Ali Ghorbani
Dean, Faculty of Computer Science UNB
Dr. Ali Ghorbani has held a variety of positions in academia for the past 31 year. Currently, Dr. Ghorbani serves as Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick. His current research focus is Web Intelligence, Network & Information Security, Complex Adaptive Systems, and Critical Infrastructure Protection. He authored more than 250 reports, book chapters, and research papers. He is the co-inventor of 3 patents in the area of Web Intelligence and Network Security. He has supervised more than 130 research associates, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. He was the project leader and principal investigator for three Atlantic Innovation Fund (AIF) projects valued at over $5M. Dr. Ghorbani is the founding Director of Information Security Centre of Excellence at UNB (http://iscx.ca). He is also the chair of the steering committee of the Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) annual conferences. He is the co-Editor-In-Chief of Computational Intelligence, an international journal, and Associate Editor of IJITWE and the ISC journal of Information Security. His book, Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems: Concepts and Techniques was published in 2009.
Presentation: Super Socialized Society and People's Opinion, People's Nexus, and People's Security
Internet socializing helps people to maintain online networks of friends and others with common interests. Evidences are mounting that cyber social networks continue to seep into the fabric of our lives, creating a super socialized society. This amazing phenomenon brings with it many opportunities and challenges, including the popular belief that the behavior of people in Cyberspace can be a representative of their real social behaviors and that this data can be employed to analyze the behavior of a society. In this talk we first provide an overview of the social era of the Web and its evolution as well as a number of technologies which are believed to shape the future of the Web, followed by the challenges that the research communities are faced with in order to address major issues related to people's nexus, opinion, and security on the Web. At the end, I will provide an overview of our contributions to these topics and a demonstration of one our technologies for 'silent polling', sentiment analysis, and opinion mining for issue discovery, using user-generated Web data.
Cosmin Munteanu
Research Officer, National Research Council
Cosmin Munteanu is a research officer at NRC-IIT where he leads the Voice & Multimodal Lab and is part of the Mobile Human-Computer Interaction Lab. For over twelve years, he has conducted research aimed at improving humans' access to and interaction with information-rich media and technologies through natural language. Presently, Cosmin leads several research projects that explore speech and natural language interaction for mobile devices and mixed reality systems.
Presentation: ALEX: next generation mobile learning
Advances in information and mobile technologies can provide an unparalleled level of support to people with low literacy skills. ALEX is a software application for mobile devices that provides reading and language learning support to low-literacy users, in classroom and in their daily life. ALEX enables its users to push beyond their comfort zones and become increasingly literate and independent through a unique combination of features.
Kevin Englehart
Associate Director, Institute of Biomedical Engineering
Kevin Englehart is the Associate Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and a registered Professional Engineer. Dr. Englehart has 125 peer- reviewed publications, and has authored five book chapters in biomedical signal processing. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation.
Dr. Englehart has coordinated partnerships with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago that have resulted in dramatic technical and medical advances in prosthetics. He is part of a team at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering that is developing a dexterous hand that uses artificial intelligence to decode the user's neural activity. This hand will be available for clinical trials in the near future.
Presentation: The Science in Science Fiction's Artificial Men
For decades, human beings possessing bionic limbs have been a fascinating element of science fiction. Although cybernetic limbs in movies and television may be based upon fantasy, and many accounts in the popular media are exaggerated, science is making great strides toward making this a reality.
This talk will describe the state-of-the-art in artificial limbs and man-machine interfaces that tap into the brain, nerves and muscles. The conclusion: very promising times are ahead for those who may benefit from artificial limbs.
Mark Masry
Manager R&D, CARIS
Mark Masry received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Brunswick in 1998 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 2003.
He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Synthesis Lab at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, Cornell University, where he worked on image understanding and computer-aided design. His research interests include spatial data structures, visualization, signal processing, and image understanding. He joined CARIS in 2006 and now manages the company's Research and Development work.
Presentation: Mapping the World's Oceans
Over the last 10 years, the sensors available to us have become ever more ubiquitous, cheap and distributed. We now have access to wealth of information from places that we've never had any access to before. Furthermore, these devices are delivering information to us continuously and at ever higher bandwidths, allowing us to see the world in ways that were previously never possible.
This talk will present the way that technology is being used to explore one of the most important, and least understood places on our earth: the ocean. We know very little about the ocean, even though we retain a tremendous dependence on its threatened resources. We will further discuss how the technology we now use to map our oceans will merge into a larger web of systems that will allow us to achieve a new interaction with the world around us.
Maurice Gallant
CEO GoFred Networks, Comnet Inc
Mr. Gallant is currently Chief Information Officer and Assistant Director of Corporate Services with the City of Fredericton. In 1997 Mr. Gallant joined the City of Fredericton as Manager of Information and Communication Technology. In 2001, he was appointed President and CEO of E-Novations, a city owned company dedicated to economic development through technology innovation.
Mr. Gallant was chairman of the City of Fredericton Smart Communities initiative in 2000 and was directly involved in the City's Intelligent Communities initiatives which has seen Fredericton place in the Top 7 Intelligent Communities for 2008 and 2009. He played a leadership role in the creation and development of the Fredericton Community Network and Fred-eZone, Canada's first free municipal Wi-Fi network.
Prior to joining the City, Maurice was Director Information and Systems Technology with the Conference Board of Canada in Ottawa. He has over 20 years relevant experience with Information Technology and Project Management.
Mr. Gallant is President of MISA-ASIM Canada (Municipal Information Systems Association-National) and serves on the Research Ethic Board of the University of New Brunswick.
Presentation: Advanced Fibre Networking / Fred-eZone
Go Fred is a not-for-profit company 100% owned by the City of Fredericton acting in the style of a utility. Its main objective is to provide leading edge low cost high speed network services within the City of Fredericton. Since its inception in the year 2000, the Go Fred network has grown to encompass most all of Fredericton with hundreds of kilometers of fiber optic network cabling connecting many government, University and private sector businesses. Go Fred has also become an Internet Service Provider to its connected members where high grade, highly available commercial Internet is purchased and delivered on a co-op model where the more that is purchased results in lower costs for all network members. Go Fred is also the operator of Fred-eZone, an award winning and world famous public WiFi network covering many square miles of Fredericton with free to use Internet. This presentation by Go Fred's CEO will go into why this initiative was created and why it has been so successful over the years. Some of the mysteries of fiber optic networking and operating a public WiFi network will no doubt be revealed. This session is sure to spark a lot of Q&A from the audience through the conference Twitter feed which can be accessed during the conference over Fred-eZone.
Sandy Bird
Co-Founder & CTO, Q1 Labs
S a n d y B i r d i s c o - f o u n d e r a n d C h i e f T e c h n o l o g y O f f i c e r o f Q 1 L a b s , w h e r e h e i s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e c o m p a n y ' s s t r a t e g i c t e c h n o l o g y d i r e c t i o n .
B i r d h a s e x t e n s i v e t e c h n o l o g y e x p e r i e n c e s p e c i a l i z i n g i n d a t a b a s e d e s i g n a n d d e v e l o p m e n t f o r w e b a p p l i c a t i o n s . P r i o r t o Q 1 L a b s , h e h e l d a v a r i e t y o f t e c h n i c a l p o s i t i o n s a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w B r u n s w i c k i n s u p p o r t , d e v e l o p m e n t , a n d a d m i n i s t r a t i o n . B i r d s t u d i e d E l e c t r i c a l E n g i n e e r i n g a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w B r u n s w i c k .
Presentation: Security Intelligence (SI)
Q1 Labs is an IT operation that specializes in Security Intelligence and is a great example of a high tech using the Go Fred network as a living lab. Their software developers are highly skilled individuals who are committed to risk reduction in large enterprises. It is through our network infrastructure that Q1Labs were able to test and document their security device. The Go Fred network is able to supply Q1 Labs with real time, real life data for analysis to assist in their product development.
To break it down: their product acts as a "watch dog" over massive volumes of internet traffic. Much like a criminal hides in a crowd, many viruses or harmful products blend into an overwhelming sea of information online. Q1Labs developers have written software that tracks what passes between internet users. The information is documented and analyzed in hopes of reducing the risk of security breaches in large corporations. By partnering with Go Fred, Q1 Labs has a living lab to test their products before releasing them to ta world-wide market.
e-Novations (GoFred) is playing a significant role in IT development in the Fredericton community and beyond. We are strong supporters of information security and are doing what we can to further the protection of our local businesses.
Scott Buffett
Research Officer, National Research Council
Scott Buffett is a research officer with the Internet Logic group at NRC-IIT and an adjunct professor in the faculty of computer science at the University of New Brunswick. After lecturing at UNB for five years, Scott joined NRC-IIT in 2002 as a visiting worker to conduct research on e-procurement decision models and strategies while working on his PhD from UNB. He then joined NRC-IIT in a full-time capacity in 2003 and completed his PhD in 2004. Scott's research interests include artificial intelligence, decision analysis, automated negotiation, preference elicitation, multiagent systems, workflow analysis, and process mining.
Presentation: OmniBid: think eBay on steroids
The OmniBid project involved researching and developing new technologies for an open system for many-to-many automated negotiation. The research pushes the state-of-the-art in several fields, including automated negotiation, preference elicitation and decision theory. The goal of the project is to fuse these research efforts together to form an integrated system, known as OmniBid; think eBay on steroids.
William McIver
Senior Research Officer, National Research Council
William McIver, Jr. is a computer scientist. He is a senior research officer at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT). He is a member of the People-Centred Technologies research group and he heads the e-Citizen Studio. Bill has research interests in community informatics, communication rights, and development design. He currently heads the Intelligent City project, which is developing location-based services for public transportation and other aspects of communities. Bill is a graduate of Morehouse College and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and Engineers Without Borders - Canada, and was a participant in the World Summit on the Information Society.
Presentation: Enhancing community life through IT: Be a geek and help your community
Information technologies can be used to address important issues in communities. This includes the environment, health care, safety, accessibility, and public transit. Fredericton has become an important area for this type of work. Bill will discuss community informatics work being done at NRC-IIT and how you can prepare for a career in this area.
