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Doctoral student Minha Ha takes her teaching seriously

While earning her undergraduate degree, Minha R. Ha tutored students on the side to earn money to pay her tuition. Now, as a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering, Ha’s work in the classroom has earned her a 2018 President’s University-Wide Teaching Award in the teaching assistant (TA) category.

Minha R. Ha
Minha R. Ha

Last year, working with Lassonde Professor Jeff Harris, Ha helped develop a new two-hour tutorial for his second-year course, MECH 2112 (Mechanical Engineering: Professionalism and Society). This year, she is the lead TA for the first-year Renaissance Engineering courses, ENG 1101 and ENG 1102, overseeing the work of 16 tutorial sections each time. Redeveloped or designed anew, her work is found in all the tutorials delivered this academic year.

“Tutorials are meant to train students in how to think,” Ha said. “I love drawing out students’ ideas and articulating them in a way that their contributions get integrated into something we all walk away with. Everyone brings his or her own intelligence and insights that add to classroom learning.”

Ha believes that teachers can help students make a difference in the world. “I want them to have a vision for their profession or life,” Ha said.

“I believe that most of our students desire to have an impact towards a humane, sustainable, equitable and meaningful world,” she wrote in her teaching philosophy statement. “It is my job to remove the barriers with them and empower them as change agents – agents able to understand the complexities and lead change in their own field of practice, identities and relationships.”

She wants her students “to have the ability to respond and recognize one another across boundaries,” which means discarding stereotypes and learning to see each other as individuals. It’s something that is evident to her within the Lassonde School of Engineering.

“We have many faculty, students and staff who care about equity, diversity and inclusion,” she said. “They are also the go-getters who roll up the sleeves and always leave a situation better than they have found it.”

She also wants her students to learn without fearing failure or ridicule.

“It’s great to have a safe environment where you can be wrong,” Ha said. “I realize that I have so much power in the classroom, by the nature of my role. I want to use that responsibly to benefit the students rather than make learning more difficult.

“So I take each student seriously, and I hope I am modelling high standards in mutual respect and trust-building. I will also be the protector of the safe space in class by confronting and challenging disrespect.”

She succeeds brilliantly, according to one of her nominators for the teaching award.

“Students highlight the compassion, empathy, enthusiasm and engagement that Minha demonstrates in her teaching,” wrote her primary nominator. “Ms. Ha is a teaching assistant who truly cares about her students and will go above and beyond normal expectations in order to see her students succeed.”

Ha believes she has been fortunate in her own teachers and colleagues and wants to give her students a similar experience.

“I was lucky to have had a master’s degree supervisor who modelled for me that it is possible to be a woman, researcher, friend, family member and role model,” Ha said.

“One thing that my mentors have all taught me is that it is difficult to separate what we do from who we are, what we accept from what we create,” Ha continued in her teaching philosophy statement. “Amazing things happen when we can bring our whole selves to the work we do.”

By Elaine Smith, special contributing writer to Innovatus

New course offers Lassonde graduate students core professional skills to excel in teaching

This fall, graduate students from each of the four departments in the Lassonde School of Engineering had the opportunity to take an innovative course, Teaching and Learning in Engineering (GS/MECH 6506), taught by Jeffrey Harris, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Students enrolled in the class were taught learning theories and were required to deliver mock lectures, implementing what they learned in class to better understand how to interpret, adapt and deliver information in an optimal way for undergraduates.

Jeffrey Harris

The course is a unique complement to the rigorous, research-focused classes that fill many graduate students’ timetables, allowing them to build foundational skills that will help them succeed in their professional and academic careers. A graduate student typically has two major roles: researcher and TA for undergraduate students. Graduate courses prepare students for their research but often ignore the professional skills-focused learning necessary to produce confident, skilled teachers.

Harris’ course is unique in that it provides workshop-style learning for students to hone their teaching skills and think critically about how best to deliver complex information. Another bonus? The course is engineering-specific and draws from the latest research in engineering education.

“Academics, including graduate students, spend a significant portion of their time in teaching roles. To realize their full potential in these roles, it’s important they have some knowledge about how students learn and what strategies can be used in a classroom,” said Harris about the benefits of the course.

While other universities offer general teaching and learning courses, the engineering focus gives students tools and strategies to apply complex material in applicable ways specific to their field.

One of Harris’ students, Roger Carrick, took the course even though it didn’t count toward his degree requirements, simply because it aligned with his personal interests. He saw the value the skills taught in the course would bring to his professional development.

“Truly great professors are the ones that can balance being a great researcher and teacher,” Carrick said. “An inevitable part of any interview to join a Faculty is a teaching seminar and the development of a teaching philosophy statement. This course helped me develop both skills, which are transferable outside of academia. Professional skills are very important, no matter what career path you take.”

For more information on the course, contact Harris at jpharris@yorku.ca.

Submitted by Raquel Farrington, communications specialist, Lassonde School of Engineering

Recent Lassonde PhD grad wins $1M Zillow Award, improves the Zestimate

A recent Lassonde School of Engineering grad is part of the three-person team that has been awarded $1 million for their winning entry in the biggest computer science competition in the history of technology. The competition was offered by Zillow, a real estate and rental marketplace focused on providing consumers with data, inspiration and knowledge. Zillow operates a suite of mobile real estate apps, with more than two dozen apps across all major platforms.

Stan Humphries, Zillow chief analytics officer (left), presents a cheque to Nima Shahbazi, a member of the team that won the Zillow Prize. Photo courtesy of Zillow

Recent graduate Nima Shahbazi (PhD ’18) entered the Zillow competition two years ago, balancing the challenge and his doctoral studies at the Lassonde School of Engineering, under the supervision of Professors Jarek Gryz and Aijun An from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.

Shahbazi worked across continents and multiple time zones with a team of two others – one from Morocco and another from the United States – to beat the Zestimate algorithm. Ultimately, the team’s winning solution beat the Zillow Benchmark Model by more than 13 per cent. They also held a comfortable lead against the second- and third-place teams.

“I was always curious about what factors drive housing prices, since my wife is an architect and the Toronto real estate market is so competitive,” said Shahbazi, speaking about why he entered the competition. “I also thought the size of the prize would attract a lot of other data scientists to the competition and I love a hard challenge.”

While Shahbazi’s PhD focused on data and pattern mining, this competition was mostly about deep learning and machine learning. “Even more than the prize money, I’m super motivated to compare my capabilities to other data scientists and see my hard work and creativity pay off in the rankings. I guess I’m a bit competitive,” said Shahbazi.

The competition was hosted on Kaggle, Google’s platform for machine learning and data mining problems where they work with top-tier conferences like NIPS, ICDM, WSDM, and big companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Kaggle competitions are a great opportunity for scientists interested in artificial intelligence to expand their knowledge and challenge their problem-solving skills on real problems with real data.

“In my research and in these competitions, I needed to learn the foundations of machine learning and data mining as well as math and statistics. There is just so much to learn. Every time I learned something new in math and statistics, it helped me with the competitions and vice versa,” said Shahbazi.

With so many top teams from around the world, this competition really required novel ideas and problem solving, he said. “The team focused on minimizing the correlation between their insights and then getting the best blend,” said Shahbazi. “We each worked on a different model and feature set and communicated actively on Slack to share our insights.”

Shahbazi explained how he was able to balance completing his PhD with the Zillow competition: “Well, I worked seven days a week and I’m passionate about solving problems. I had enough time to work on both parts, since I had very limited vacations for the past four years. But it was worth it.”

Despite working with a team that lived in different countries and time zones, Shahbazi was able to make the project work. “It was quite challenging, but we actively shared ideas on Slack and codes on Github,” said Shahbazi. “Our poor computers were running 24-7 and when a good result came out, we updated our shared roadmap and kept going.”

As for what he will do with his share of the prize money, Shahbazi said he will invest some in his startup Mindle.ai and maybe take his family on a trip to somewhere warm.

To learn more about the competition and the team’s award-winning submission, read the official announcement.

Applications for Lassonde Undergraduate Research Awards are due Feb. 14

Bergeron Centre

This will be Lassonde’s fifth year running the successful Lassonde Undergraduate Research Awards (LURA) program. In 2015, Lassonde was the only Faculty offering internal summer research awards, but since then other Faculties have followed suit. This clearly demonstrates the need for research experience among undergraduate students.

The competition is run together with the National Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA) competition.

What started as a pilot program addressing the need to give undergraduate students research experience is now a popular competition that ends with a professional conference each summer. Check out highlights from last year’s conference at lassondeundergraduateresearch.com/2018.

The LURA is open to qualified students from Lassonde and beyond, including from countries like Costa Rica, Poland and France. Many of the LURA and NSERC USRA graduates who have gone on to conduct research as graduate students acknowledge the important role the NSERC USRA and LURA played in their career choices.

Some have taken the experience and leveraged it into co-op positions, enabling them to advance in an industry setting the following year.

Students looking to gain hands-on research experience in a Lassonde research lab will be busy between now and the Feb. 14 deadline to apply for the LURA and NSERC USRA for the summer of 2019. Students need to identify a professor who will take them under their wing for 16 weeks during the summer months and submit an application for adjudication.

All application procedures are outlined at lassondeundergraduateresearch.com and some, but not all, projects are listed there too. Available projects range from algorithms for satellite rendezvous to microfluidic devices.

Professor Pouya Rezai awarded grants totalling $175K for environmental contamination research

Pouya Rezai
Pouya Rezai

Lassonde School of Engineering Associate Professor Pouya Rezai from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, director of the Advanced Center for Microfluidics Technology & Engineering (ACμTE), has been awarded two research grants totalling $175K to help support his environmental contamination monitoring research efforts.

The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) grant began this month in collaboration with the University of Guelph, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Precision Biomonitoring Inc., EDG Public Health, Diatom Consulting, Entomo Farms and Fulton Food Safety Inc. The Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grant commences in February in collaboration with Precision Biomonitoring Inc. located in Guelph, Ont.

The grants will go toward funding multiple graduate and undergraduate students at the Lassonde School of Engineering to undertake the proposed research as well as support the direct and indirect cost of research at Rezai’s lab.

“The ideal outcome [of this research] is to develop a prototype technology for on-site food and water testing capable of purifying, sorting and detecting bacteria and DNA molecule signatures that are dispersed at very low concentrations in complex fluids,” said Professor Rezai.

This technology would provide a point-of-care detection tool for food and water inspectors and quality assurance staff to perform environmental sampling and sanitation effectiveness assessment, then initiate corrective actions, enabling the development of control measures (e.g. operator training) to prevent and/or reduce risks and minimize remediation and processing costs for producers.

Instead of time-consuming culturing by third parties or indirect or nonspecific testing, users will gain access to a lower-cost, easy-to-use, rapid and sensitive investigative technology to detect indicator bacteria and DNA signatures on-site.

Over the next five years, Rezai and his team plan to establish and expand partnerships with the biotechnology and environmental inspection industry and organizations to develop this technology and introduce it to the market.

“Ultimately, we hope this technology can save lives and reduce the impact of environmental contamination on our society.”

Lassonde Engineering Society sees three teams move on to compete in Canadian Engineering Competition

Osgoode teams take first and second at Canadian National Negotiation Competition

In November, the Lassonde Engineering Society hosted the York Engineering Competition (YEC), one of the largest student-run engineering competitions in Canada. The event hosted more than 250 student participants across three weekends, tasked with working in teams to solve an open-ended challenge over the course of six hours.

The winning YEC teams headed to the Ontario Engineering Competition last weekend at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., to compete against top teams from other Ontario-based engineering schools.

Four of Lassonde’s seven teams placed in the top three positions and, of those, three will be going on to compete nationally at the Canadian Engineering Competition this March at the University of Waterloo.

The teams are:

  • Programming (second place): Julia Paglia, Shawn Verma, Josh Abraham and Amer Alshoghri;
  • Senior Design (second place): Michael Tabascio, Konrad Kaczor, Chandler Cabrera and Jacob Samson;
  • Re-Engineering (second place): Koroush Toghrol and Emily Secnik; and
  • Debate (third place): Erin Corrado and Aryaman Doctor.

“I feel like we learn a lot of technical skills in our classroom, but we don’t get a lot of insight into solving real-world problems,” says Emily Secnik, president of the Lassonde Engineering Society. “As a student, it’s all about learning at these competitions and there are no repercussions if something goes wrong. It provides an outlet for students to expand their knowledge and also have a lot of fun.”

Jeffrey Harris, assistant professor and Lassonde Engineering Society faculty advisor,  describes these competitions as “an intensive form of experiential education.” He says, “Students learn to experiment, fail quickly, and learn from their mistakes so they can improve their designs. In the process, they build camaraderie and develop an identity as an engineering student.”

For more information, visit the Canadian Engineering Competition website.

Second-year Space Engineering student launching her dreams this April

Megan Gran. Image:

For many Space Engineering students, launching a rocket into the ether is a dream that takes years of school and work experience to achieve. With an unmatched work ethic, infectious passion and strong support network, second-year Space Engineering student Megan Gran’s dreams will be blasting off approximately seven years sooner than expected.

Megan Gran. Image: Nick Maxwell

Gran is one of 24 students in the world who has been selected to participate in the Fly a Rocket! program offered by the European Space Agency at the Andøya Space Center in Norway. The program, which requires some pre-training in the months leading up to it, will take place in April. Gran was selected to be a part of the program’s Sensor Experiments team, performing calculations and monitoring how the nine-foot-tall Mongoose 98 rocket, once launched, observes the surrounding environment.

Growing up in Sudbury, Ont., Gran was fascinated by robotics and space as a child, spending much of her time tinkering with robotics kits, micro controllers, Lego and Meccano. Her mom, a market researcher and statistician, and her dad, a chief financial officer and CPA, encouraged her to explore her passion for engineering. Despite being top of her class in physics and math, Gran’s mom told her that pursuing an education in engineering wasn’t something she considered a possibility for herself at the time. Her dad, a hobbyist tinkerer who helped her learn coding at a young age, opted for a career in accounting and business despite being offered a spot in systems design engineering.

“When my parents saw that engineering spark in me, they saw the pieces of themselves they were never able to test out,” said Gran. “They are very proud of me because I am living my dreams and passion.”

The Canada-Wide Science Fair was her first foray into building robots to accomplish tasks.  Two trips to the national competition netted her two bronze medals. From there, she sought out mentors in high school, many of them math teachers she worked closely with as the lead of her high school’s FIRST Robotics team (4069 LoEllen Robotics). “I always get along with math teachers,” she said.

But not everyone who crossed Gran’s path saw her potential. Her voice changes slightly recalling a moment in Grade 5, just before her love for robotics and space ramped up, when a teacher told her parents, “Science doesn’t seem to be for her.” She switched schools the following year.

When it came time to consider post-secondary education, the Space Engineering program offered by the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University stood out.

“It’s a happy medium [between robotics and aerospace]. You get a lot of robotics learning but you also learn about payload design,” said Gran. “I didn’t see a program like it anywhere else in Ontario.”

Her first year was spent in a blur of classes and studying. In the pursuit of getting top grades and graduating as quickly as possible, she took on extra courses so that she could realize her dreams of building a rocket. The heavy course load meant that penciling in time for extracurricular activities, as she had done in high school, was next to impossible. Heading into second year, Gran dropped some classes so that she could fit in time for extracurricular learning and joined the York University Robotics Society, a student club.

On her friend’s recommendation, Gran applied to the Fly a Rocket! program, realizing that with a more balanced course load she’d have the time to participate fully in her studies and the program.

“[My peers] at Lassonde, specifically in Space Engineering, are very passionate about everything they do,” she said. “Professors, even better, are extremely receptive to that. They really want the best for us and they aren’t looking to throw up some slides and get us out. They want school to be an experience.”

This unyielding support from fellow students and professors gave Gran confidence that her decision was the right one. Being chosen as one of 24 students to attend the prestigious rocket program solidified that notion.

“I realized school is only temporary,” she said. “Ironically, I am getting to launch that rocket seven years sooner than planned because I let myself be happy.

“Ultimately, I want to make a change, make something impactful for the world and put something into space,” she added. “It still hasn’t sunk in: I’m launching a rocket – into space!”

Follow her on Twitter @MegtheSpacie. For more information, visit the Fly a Rocket! program website.

By Raquel Farrington, Lassonde School of Engineering

The going global of York University’s big data analytics

The 4th International Conference on Big Data & Information Analytics was held at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) at Rice University in Houston from Dec. 17 to 19, 2018.

York University is one of the founding institutes for this international conference series. The University’s researchers contributed to the success of the series, previously held in Xi’an (2015) and Changsha (2016), China, and Toronto (2017), in such areas as market and medical data analytics, forced migration and vision data modelling, disaster and emergency information retrieval, and rapid simulation simulations.

York University’s researchers and alumni at the Houston Big Data Analytics conference, from left to right: Fulian Yin, Rongsong Liu, Xi Huo, Zachary McCarthy and Kyeongah Nah

In Houston, PhD candidate Zachary McCarthy from the Laboratory for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (LIAM) at York University presented LIAM’s collaborative work with the Public Health Agency of Canada on large-scale simulations of food-borne pathogen cross-contamination during industrial processing. Postdoctoral Fellow Kyeongal Nah delivered an invited talk on LIAM’s project funded by the GlaxoSmithKline on tick-borne infection prevention and immunization effectiveness evaluation using a variety of climate, surveillance and clinical data. Professor Fulian Yin, a visiting scientist to York University, introduced the ongoing collaboration between LIAM and the Chinese Media University on social media big data modelling and informatics.

“It is exciting to see York’s alumni emerge to leaders and active players in the area of big data modelling and analytics,” said University Distinguished Research Professor Jianhong Wu, a co-chair of the conference series. University of Miami Professor Xi Huo (a postdoctoral Fellow at York University from 2014-17) and University of Wyoming Professor Rongsong Liu (PhD ’06) were organizers of invited sessions. University of Connecticut Professor Guojun Gan (PhD ’07) presented his research on actuarial science big data clustering analysis.

Faculty of Health Professor James Elder, York Research Chair in Human and Computer Vision, is the co-chair of York’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence & Society. He attended the previous conferences in Changsha and Toronto. Elder notes that “the conference series provides an excellent platform to encourage an interdisciplinary approach towards big data and information analytics.”

Three Lassonde professors chosen for Canadian Space Agency program

The Canadian Space Agency’s Flights and Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology (FAST) funding initiative supports space research in Canadian post-secondary institutions. Three professors from the Department of Earth & Space Science & Engineering from the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University have been chosen for the program.

The awarded funding totals $600,000 and enables each professor to test their developed technologies in the unique atmospheric environment of space. The following are the successful projects:

Project: Reflected Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Signals
Funding: $399,630 over three years

Sunil Bisnath

Professor Sunil Bisnath is the principal investigator on the project, working with Lassonde professors Regina Lee and Franz Newland and a group of graduate students.

Bisnath and his team have developed an instrument that can receive weak reflected GNSS signals to detect soil moisture content. If successful, this low-cost, widely available determination of soil moisture would be significant for users, including climate scientists and policy-makers. The FAST program enables the improvement and testing of this instrument and its data analysis for a future satellite mission.

“Like any engineer, we want to see the research translated into a product or technology that will benefit its users. This three-year grant gives us the opportunity to fine tune our ideas, expand them and test them to prove the approach will work,” said Bisnath. 

Project: Mars Atmospheric Panoramic Camera and Laser Experiment (MAPLE)
Funding: $100,000 over three years

John Moores

Professor John Moores is the principal investigator working with science principal investigator and Postdoctoral Fellow Christina Smith and a team of graduate students: Charissa Campbell, Brittney Cooper and Giang Nguyen.

Moores and his team are developing a small instrument called the MAPLE to be used at Mars for investigation of the Martian atmosphere. Currently, cameras used in Mars missions are not laser-panoramic. With MAPLE, Moores and his colleagues can examine the vertical distribution of dust and ice aerosols to better understand the dynamics of the Martian environment and prepare for human exploration.

The FAST program enables camera testing in locations like the High Arctic, where Mars-like particles can be found. The camera will be operated remotely from York University.

Of the opportunity, Smith said, “We want to prove the concept. This grant allows us to pursue this prototype as far as we possibly can and cement relationships with the local industry.” 

Project: In-flight assessment of the Spatial Heterodyne Spectroscopy (SHS) instrument
Funding: $100,000 over three years

Gordon Shepherd

Professor Gordon Shepherd is the principal investigator on the project, which began with the development of an optical technique called SHS, led by Research Associate Brian Solheim at York University. This attracted the attention of Martin Kaufmann of the Jülich Institute of Energy & Climate Research in Germany, who sent graduate student Michael Deiml to York University to work with Solheim on the design of an SHS to measure temperature in the upper atmosphere.

The SHS was then built in Germany and with the help of Professor Jinjun Shan at York University, the team identified a Chinese satellite mission willing to fly this instrument. Shepherd is part of a mission that will test an SHS instrument in space. The FAST program supports the Canadian participation in this international program.

Through the program, Shepherd and his team will conduct in-flight assessments of the SHS instrument for the measurement of upper atmospheric temperature from 80 to 120 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. This enhanced knowledge will provide unique new information on waves in temperature caused by sources near the Earth’s surface influencing our understanding of the coupling of atmospheric regions and the changes arising from solar variations and climate change.

Shepherd credits Lassonde’s administrative support as being integral to securing this opportunity with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). “Ideally, I’d like to see the instrument perform perfectly and I’d like to see great data that we can spend some years analyzing, learning more about the atmosphere,” said Shepherd.  “The CSA grant has given us this chance.”

For more information on FAST, visit the website.

Professor Michael Daly a panellist at ROM Connects event on OSIRIS-REx mission

OSIRIS-REx Artist's Concept OSIRIS-REx extends its sampling arm as it moves in to make contact with the asteroid Bennu.
An artist’s concept drawing of OSIRIS-REx OSIRIS-REx extends its sampling arm as it moves in to make contact with the asteroid Bennu.

Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Mike Daly will be a featured guest at the ROM Connects panel discussion called “Getting to know Bennu: updates on the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission,” taking place Jan. 25.

Michael Daly
Michael Daly

Daly, a professor in Lassonde’s Department of Earth & Space Science & Engineering at York University, will be on the panel along with Canadian experts Tim Haltigin (Canadian Space Agency), Kate Howells (Planetary Society; Government of Canada’s Space Advisory Board member) and Kim Tait (Royal Ontario Museum).

During the event, the group will provide the latest updates on OSIRIS-REx, the ongoing mission to return a sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu.

OSIRIS-REx – the first-ever sampling mission by NASA to the distant asteroid Bennu – was successfully launched into space on Sept. 8 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission aims to revolutionize our understanding of asteroids and the origins of the universe. Daly was the scientific lead for the mission.

Hear from scientists as they analyze the newest OSIRIS-REx data, transmitted to Earth following the spacecraft’s arrival at Bennu in December 2018.

The event takes place from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre, Level 1B, and is free to attend. RSVP is required and tickets are available on the ROM website.