PhD student, Mark Nazemi was recently awarded the McQuarrie Hunter Graduate Student Scholarship for his chronic pain research. This is the first time that the award was offered at Simon Fraser University for funding research in chronic pain.
Graduate students Amber Choo and Xin Tong, along with FCATs Undergraduate Research Fellow Cheryl Yu, won two awards at the Unite 2014 Conference in Seattle. Their two-dimensional boardgame – Aztec Treasures – was voted Best Game in the Unity & Windows Training and Porting Lab. Microsofts Surface devices were part of the award. Choo, Tong and Yu, who are Research Assistants in the Pain Studies Lab at Simon Fraser University in Canada, also snagged the Microsoft Surface Award for successfully porting three Virtual Reality (VR) games and one 2D boardgame to Windows phone online application store. Each received a Microsoft Nokia Lumia 1520 cell phone. According to the Pain Studies Lab founder and director, Dr. Diane Gromala, the immersive VR games were developed for patients who live with neuropathic or chronic pain to potentially help them manage this disease, as their early research results indicate. The board game was originally designed in SIATs graduate class in video game design. The UNITE conference attracted well over 1,000 attendees.
Both Xin Tong and Chao Feng who are graduate students in Pain Studies Lab presented two posters at co-located venues SIGGRAPH/Expressive/Computational Aesthetics 2014. Xins poster presented her new pain expression visualization design and pain patients activity data visualization. Chaos poster presented part of his thesis research affective space visualizations. The posters represented the latest studies conducted at the Pain Studies Lab about pain visualizations and personal pain data analytics.
SIGGRAPH is one the most prestigious venues for showcasing breakthroughs in practices and production in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Computational Aesthetics is one of SIGGRAPHs co-located venues that bridges the analytic and synthetic by integrating aspects of computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the fine, applied & performing arts.
Xin Tong, Dr. Diane Gromala, Dr. Chris Shaw and Patrick Clarkes paper got accepted in Electronic Visualisation and the Arts Conference (EVA) 2014 and Dr. Shaw presented their paper Transformation between Electronic Arts and Chronic Pain: Long-term Body Activity Data Visualization and Pain Animation Expression in EVA.
Through SFUs partnerships with Fraser Health and other health organizations, the SFUs Digital Health Hub solves real health problems with digital solutions. The group is headed by Maryam Sadeghi, the CEO of MetaOptima Technology Inc. She completed her PhD at SFU in Computing Science and earned numerous awards for her work. She developed an application for helping detect skin cancer.
Innovation Boulevard is a new network of health related entities that strives to improve health care. Their vision lies primarily in improving four areas of health care:
- Improving health care outcomes for patients.
- Implementing intelligent solutions for the health care system.
- Attracting talented clinicians and researchers.
- Growing companies in health care technology and services sectors.
Innovation Boulevard is located in between SFU Surrey and Surrey Memorial Hospital, a perfect union of theory and practice.
See more at: http://www.surrey.ca/business-economic-development/13158.aspx#sthash.RMJRYMpW.dpuf
Dr. Gromala and Dr. Shaw along with the Pain Studies Lab’s graduate students Mehdi Karamnejad, Xin Tong and Chao Feng attended GRAND 2014 in Ottawa. In Phase Two, CHRONIC project Leaders, NIs and HQPs coordinated meetings to discuss current progress within each sub-project and future research approaches and directions. The conference also facilitated networking sessions in order to assist project leaders and graduate students find potential collaborators. Additionally, graduate students Mehdi Karamnejad and Xin Tong presented posters about their new research and study. Chao Feng demoed his thesis research in various tracks.
The interdisciplinary “Health and Digital Media Research Workshop” took place on Friday October 25, 2013 at Simon Fraser Universitys Harbour Centre. This workshop aimed to connect current GRAND NCE researchers with CIHR and CHRP researchers to explore possible healthcare research projects that respond to significant real-world healthcare issues. Many GRAND researchers are collaborating with researchers in health and medical sciences, and are interested in continuing and initiating new health and medical science related projects. Keynote Speakers were Dr. Kendall Ho (UBC, Vancouver General Hospital Emergency Medicine), and Dr. Yaakov Stern (Columbia University, NY, NY). 24-36 research faculty and graduate students joined the discussions, as well as 12-18 health and medical scholars.
More information on the Workshop can be here: http://www.sfu.ca/~sld5/HDMW/
Mehdi Karamnejad presented two posters at co-located venues SIGGRAPH/Expressive 2013. The posters represented the latest research being conducted at the Pain Studies Lab on Human-Computer Interaction, Biofeedback, Game Design, and Social Sciences. SIGGRAPH is one the most prestigious venues for showcasing breakthroughs in practices and production in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
Dr. Gromala and Dr. Shaw along with the Pain Studies Labs graduate students Mark Nazemi, Mehdi Karamnejad, Maryam Mobini, Amber Choo, Ozgun Eylul, Jeremy Mamisao, and Bryn Ludlow attended GRAND 2013 / Canada 3.0 joint conference in Toronto. Well-knowns such as Chris Anderson, Jane McGonigal, and Jian Ghomeshi were among the keynote speakers for the event.
The project leaders of GRAND NCE coordinated meetings to discuss and assess current progress within each project and discuss future research paths. The conference also facilitated networking sessions in order to assist project leaders and graduate students find potential collaborators.
Additionally, graduate students presented their papers and posters in various tracks and showcased their new revolutionary approaches for different projects addressing problems in computer science, graphics, sound design, visual analytics, and social sciences.
