Computer Science Associate Professor Joanna McGrenere has won a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation award for her proposal Adaptive Touch Targeting for Mobile Devices: Supporting Users Across the Adult Lifespan. The goal of this work is to make touch-based devices easier to use for people of all ages, taking into account a user’s ability, skill, and context of use. Her proposal was one of 16 funded out of 141 submissions. For more details, click here.
Documentary film Passage of Dreams: The Chung Collection has been nominated for a Golden Sheaf Award in the multicultural category. The documentary features the stories of UBC alumnus Wallace B. Chung and his childhood love of collecting Canadian Pacific items. Featuring personal stories shared by Chung on his beloved artifacts, the film provides a look at B.C. history from the perspective of early Chinese-Canadian pioneers.
The Golden Sheaf Awards are part of the Yorkton Film Festival in Saskatchewan, the longest running festival of its kind in North America, and one of Canada’s top film and video festivals.
The UBC Library Chung Collection can be found on Level 1 of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Passage of Dreams is now available for loan at several UBC Library branches: Rare Books & Special Collections, Koerner Library, Asian Library and Education Library.
More of British Columbia’s unique and storied past will soon be accessible online thanks to the latest funding round from the B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP). The program, launched by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre in 2006, provides matching grants to support projects that make B.C. heritage freely accessible to the public via the Internet.
This year, more than $203,000 in matching funds was allocated for 24 projects throughout the province. In total, the BCHDP has awarded more than $1.2 million for 144 grants over the past seven years.
Newspapers across the province will be digitized as part of this latest round of projects, as well as British Columbia Sessional Papers and City of Vancouver council minutes from the 1970s. Other projects include items from the Nikkei National Museum’s Japanese Canadian Redress Digitization Project; mountaineering photos from an alpine photographs collection at Simon Fraser University Library; and negatives from the first 20 years of the Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver.
The UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences building has won an Association of Consulting Engineering Companies B.C. (ACEC-BC) 2013 Award for Engineering Excellence in the Buildings category. ACEC-BC is British Columbia’s provincial association of engineering consulting firms. For more information, click here.
Two UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems students have been awarded the 2013 AICF Douglas McRorie Memorial Scholarship from the Agricultural Institute of Canada (AICF). Valeria Castellanos Hurtado received the $5,000 PhD level award for 2013, and Ishrat Gadhok is one of two recipients of a $3,000 award at the Masters level.
Hurtado is a PhD candidate in Integrated Studies, where her thesis research is on the environmental effects of trade liberalization and other price dynamics in Canadian agriculture. Gadhok is enrolled in the Masters of Food and Resource Economics Program in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, where she has learned fundamental business concepts such as supply chain management, project management, budgeting, investment and finance in the context of the food industry.
Master of Occupational Therapy second-year students Rosie Higgins, Sylvie Rousseau and Chad Foster created a short video on occupational therapy with the goal of winning the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapy’s 2012 gOT Spirit Challenge. Within a few hours of posting, the video hit 500 views, which increased to 1,000 views per day, and now has over 70,000 views on YouTube. The video has gone international with requests to feature and subtitle the video in Singapore, Spain and the U.K.
The gOT Spirit Challenge is an annual competition for occupational therapy students across Canada to enhance awareness about occupational therapy during the month of October (also known as OT month).
For more information on the Master of Occupational Therapy program at UBC, click here. To view the YouTube video, click here.
UBC Engineering team Supermileage earned second place in the Urban Concept Car category at the 2013 Shell Eco Marathon with their car, Odysseus. The annual competition took place in Houston, Texas, with several team members travelling to the event. The UBC Supermileage team develops gas-powered fuel-efficient vehicles for competitions and currently has two vehicles, both of which competed in the event. For more information, click here.
Creating Connections is a conference on gender diversity in science, engineering, and technology, featuring personal and professional development, networking and discussions. The conference, to be held on May 10 and 11 at UBC, is presented by Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science and Technology, and the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering. Early bird registration closes April 15. To register, and for more information, click here.
