Five innovative research projects from Queen’s University are receiving funding from the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), a new research and development initiative funded by IBM Canada.

“The SOSCIP initiative supported by IBM Canada is an exciting new opportunity for researchers at the School of Computing,” says Director Selim Akl. “Access to state-of-the-art computing resources such the SOSCIP cloud and BlueGene/Q supercomputer provided by the consortium will enhance our research programs and enable us to investigate new and exciting computational problems of importance to our society.”

IBM Canada will invest $175 million to build a new research and development centre and to ensure funding is available for research into better managing and analyzing large amounts of data to solve critical world challenges including: aging infrastructure, water conservation, healthcare and energy conservation.

The Queen’s researchers receiving funding are:

Dongmei Chen (Geography) –Dr. Chen is developing a new, quicker process to extract data from a new generation of high-resolution satellite systems and digital aero photos taken from airplanes. The data could be used for various environmental applications and planning.

Mohammad Zulkernine (School of Computing) –Dr. Zulkernine to testing his techniques and processes for ensuring the security of the cloud computing environment for both its providers and users.

Douglas Mewhort (Psychology) – Dr. Mewhort is developing a new process that will show the decline of fluency as dementia progresses and building an early diagnosis tool using that technique.

Mohamed Ibnkahla (Electrical and Computer Engineering) – Dr. Ibnkahla is creating a real-time water data processing system to aid in water contamination alerts, ensure enough water is supplied to the public and control residential water use.

Hossam Hassanein (School of Computing) – Dr. Hassanein is developing a process to capture data from increasingly complex transportation and technology systems. He is also using new software to process the data and help planners in their decision making processes.