Chairs & awards

Concordia University and Hydro-Québec have joined forces to establish a new Senior Industrial Research Chair in the broad area of sustainable energy systems. Building on the chairholder’s recent efforts in the fields of energy efficiency, renewable energy and machine design, innovative solutions will be developed to increase the electric efficiency of the energy system and contribute to the conservation of non-renewable energy sources. The Chair will further explore sustainable and affordable energy sources suitable for Hydro-Québec customers, such as: biomass, osmosis and small wind. The practical integration of these sources will then be examined at particular customer locations in settings ranging from urban office buildings to rural farms.

Dr. Zeng's research aims at developing robust software tools to enhance the quality and efficiency of innovative product development in manufacturing companies. The foundation of these tools is the formal design science he has developed based on the recursive logic of design he proposed with his collaborator in 1991. His research includes design process modeling, requirements engineering, design knowledge representation, surface reconstruction, as well as finite element modeling. He has applied his research results to some industry projects, such as intelligent sketching interface for product conceptual design, integrated CAD/FEM radar analysis system, etc. Dr. Zeng and his team are currently exploring the applications of their software tools to manufacturing industry such as aerospace engineering, automotive engineering, and biomedical devices manufacturing.

With the striking expansion of information technology, security is emerging as the most important challenge facing computer science and engineering. Individuals, corporations and organizations are relying more and more on information systems that are connected to public networks, to transmit confidential and security-critical data. This trend has increased the risks of interception, malicious instrumentation and misuse of sensitive electronic information. Accordingly, information systems must be protected against any malicious attempt that may affect secrecy (by leaking sensitive information), integrity (by corrupting information), authentication (by impersonating authorized principals), availability (by denying service to legal users), etc. The negative impacts of this situation include: loss or endangerment of human life, financial loss, unauthorized use or misuse of information, denial of services, alteration and/or compromise of data or software. Our research aims at creating dedicated processes, methodologies, techniques and tools to prevent attacks, reduce vulnerabilities, and mitigate the underlying risks and forensically investigate cyber incidents.

Today, many of the world's largest databases are, in fact, data warehouses. By integrating detailed, transactional data from across the enterprise, organizations are able to assess historical trends and plan for the future. With the emergence of the web, however, warehouse data volumes have grown to the point where traditional warehouse architectures often fail to provide the kind of real time performance that today's interactive users typically demand. Dr. Eavis' current work focuses on a pair of related goals. In the first case, his research lab is investigating methods that will support more intuitive analytical services on top of the underlying warehouse repositories. Such functionality is often broadly described by the term Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Specific research themes include visualization, object oriented query facilities, query optimization, and multi-dimensional caching. At the same time, he is targeting high performance architectures, with a particular emphasis on cluster computing, multi-core algorithms, and distributed grid architectures.

Research work on Materials and Composites places emphasis on the developments of new products, processes and technologies and looking at quality and performance issues (fracture toughness, resistance against the absorption of small molecules such as water, alkali-water solution and oxygen, flammability resistance) and making them more cost effective for industrial applications be it in aerospace, automotive, biomedical or civil engineering structures. Currently, Dr. Hoa, a leading expert in his field of study, is focused on advances in polymer nanocomposites, long fiber thermoplastic composites, nanomechanics of polymeric materials, shrinkage of resin, and intelligent materials.

Minimization and avoidance of pollutant releases and understanding the movement and transformation of contaminants once they reach the environment, are required to avoid the degradation of the environment and hence the ecosystem. The increasing population is leading to fewer waste management options, environmental destruction, and increased disasters due to global warming. Environmental management and technological development will ultimately enhance the quality of life of the public and the quality of the environment for the entire ecosystem. Through this research program, Dr. Mulligan looks to develop technologies for the treatment of air, water, waste and soil contaminants, as well as investigate the processes for the transport and degradation of chemicals in the complete environment across all media.

Concordia has long been known for its expertise in advanced transportation systems and highway safety, human response to workplace vibration and driver-vehicle interaction. Dr. Rakheja’s research work in this area has evolved to what is called vehicular ergodynamics, a field that involves systematic studies on the dynamics of the transport system on the human operator, with a special emphasis on dynamic environmental interactions. Ergodynamics addresses the mutual adaptation of the system and the human operator, to enhance system performance and optimal efficiency with appropriate considerations of the performance limits of the operator. The research efforts are directed towards developments in theories on human perception and response; effective objective and subjective measurement techniques; considerations of various human (age, gender, anthropometry, anthropodynamics, and neuro-muscular response) and environmental (visibility and road conditions) factors; vehicle dynamics and highway safety; dynamic driver-vehicle-environment interactions; and intelligent vehicles.

Recognition technologies play an important role in information processing. Each day, billions of business and financial documents have to be processed by computers. Data needs to be captured from these documents and entered for processing. Because of the lack of computerized handwriting recognition machines, most of this data, be it an amount on a cheque or postal code, have to be entered into the computer by tedious, slow, and costly manual operations. The objective of Dr. Suen, world-renowned in his field, is to integrate several promising recognition methods, and at the same time, develop robust techniques, while discovering and applying new perceptual knowledge to improve and optimize character recognition schemes. The long-term goal is to produce an optical character and word recognition (OCR or OWR) system, which will ultimately outperform or be at least comparable to the capability of human vision.

The phenomenon of wing rock or limit-cycle oscillation that normally occurs in aircraft is mainly due to mechanical backlash, dead zone and hysteresis. This phenomenon is of great concern in the aerospace industry. Extensive research has been carried out to find means of controlling this unwanted oscillation. Mechanical backlash, dead-zone and hysteresis that generate such oscillations fall into the general category of non-smooth nonlinearities. They are common in the industrial controls systems, ranging from high-technology applications (micromanipulation in fabrication of semiconductors, ultra-precision turning of turbine shafts, micro-stabbers and micropipettes in cellular biology) to traditional applications (robot manipulators, and drive systems of large vehicles). Dr. Su’s plans are to develop control theories, engineering design methods and technology for non-smoooth dynamic systems, arising from parameter variations or from neglected dynamics.
The development of control methods have a direct impact on the products being produced, and are suitable for any motion systems with mechanical connections, hydraulic servo-valves, piezoelectric actuators, electric servomotors, and biomedical actuator systems that require fast and precision control.

Digital signal processing techniques have found a variety of applications over the last 15 to 20 years in the processing of signals in such diverse areas as biomedical image processing, telecommunications, acoustics, image and video signal processing and seismology. The overall objective of Dr. Swamy’s research is to develop fundamental underlying theory for efficient and reliable processing of speech, image and video signals, and to design algorithms for their software and hardware implementation for communication and other applications. Some of his current research projects include; low-complexity speech coding; silent suppression techniques for packet voice communication; voice activity detection using higher-order statistics; echo cancellation, de-noising and compression of digital images; error resilient video coding algorithms and their performance evaluation; robust watermarking techniques using wavelets; and the development of efficient multidimensional vector radix algorithms.

The revolution of information technology and electronics in general, is driven by the extraordinary advances in semiconductor technology. Today’s microelectronics systems are complex designs with literally tens of millions of transistors on a single chip, often combining microcontroller and DSP processor cores, memory blocks, application specific logic and mixed-signal functions. Complexity, time-to-market pressure and evolving requirements pose new challenges in the design and verification process. Traditional testing such as simulation methods, can no longer give reasonable assurance for the quality of a product. Dr. Tahar’s research aims to develop techniques and tools enabling the verification of real-size microelectronics designs through alternative means, called formal methods, involving all possible scenarios of input and state combinations, giving very strong results about the correctness of designs. The proposed techniques will be validated using real designs, which are industrial benchmarks. This approach will advance the systems specification and verification process, thus shortening the design cycle of microelectronics products.

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