UBC Department of Computer Science

Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems / Computer Science (ICICS/CS) building at UBC

The UBC Computer Science department at the University of British Columbia was established in May 1968 and is the top computer science department in Canada.^[1] UBC CS is located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Research activities

The department's research activities are organized around a number of collaborative research groups:

• Bioinformatics, and Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Lab (ß-Lab)
• Data Management and Mining Lab (DMM)
• Imager Laboratory for Graphics, Visualization and HCI (Imager)
• Integrated System Design (ISD)
• Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI)
• Networks, Systems and Security Lab (NSS)
• Scientific Computing Laboratory (SCL)
• Software Practices Lab (SPL)

History

UBC Computer Science was established in May 1968. The department experienced a significant period of growth in the 21st century. It now has 55 faculty, 35 staff, 200 graduate students, and 1300 undergraduates.

Faculty

• Anne Condon: works in bioinformatics and computational complexity.
• Holger H. Hoos: works in empirical algorithmics (with a focus on automated algorithm design), artificial intelligence and bioinformatics. He is the author of the book Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications (with Thomas Stützle) and President of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC).
• Gregor Kiczales: His best known work is on Aspect-oriented programming and the AspectJ extension for Java at Xerox PARC. He has also contributed to the design of the Common Lisp Object System, and is the author of the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, along with Jim Des Rivieres and Daniel G. Bobrow.
• David Lowe: is the inventor of the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT)^[2] which has profoundly impacted object recognition, robotic mapping and navigation, image stitching, 3D modeling, gesture recognition, video tracking, and match moving.

• Alan Mackworth: holds a Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and is the founding director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. He is Past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
• Ron Rensink: popularized the "flicker" technique in which two images of scenes alternate repeatedly with a brief (80 millisecond) blank screen after each image, giving the display a flickering appearance. With the blank screen in place, surprisingly large changes could be made to the scene without the observer reliably noticing them. Rensink et al. (1997) also introduced the term change blindness^[3]

Former Faculty

• Hugh Dempster
• Maria Klawe: served as head of the department from 1988 until 1995.
• Nick Pippenger
• Richard Rosenberg
• Jack Snoeyink

See also

• Sauder School of Business
• Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
• Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

References

1. Science Watch. Tracking trends and performance in basic research, 2009 - Impact of UBC CS publications.
2. Lowe, David G. (1999). "Object recognition from local scale-invariant features". Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision. 2. pp. 1150–1157. doi:10.1109/ICCV.1999.790410.
3. Rensink, Ronald A.; O'Regan, J. Kevin; Clark, James J. (1997). "TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE:. The Need for Attention to Perceive Changes in Scenes". Psychological Science. 8 (5): 368–373. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00427.x. |contribution= ignored (help)

External links

• The webpage of the CS department at UBC