Concordia Journal Home > Archives > November 20, 2008 issue >

Accolades 

JMSB students continue to out do themselves at competitions around the continent. Nick D'Urbano, Kevin Gardner Gregory, Thomas Horvath and Cleo Roch represented their school at the CIBER Case Challenge in Ohio and came in third place overall, under the tutelage of lead coach Jessica Andrews. Meanwhile, Kalil Diaz, Caster Parham, Matthew Parker-Jones and Karan Shanmugarajah made up one of four teams to reach the finals at the McCombs International Business Challenge in Austin, Texas. According to Coach Mark Haber "there are no rankings after the winner, but we were told by judges that it was very close between us and [University of Hong Kong] so I'll take it as a second place."

Constantinos Constantinides (Computer Science and Software Engineering) was recognized for his work on two different papers. He received the Outstanding Student Paper Award with co-author Elaheh Safari Sharifabadi at the ACM Annual International Conference on the Ada Programming Language last month in Portland, Oregon. Meanwhile, his paper "An Algebraic Query Method for Static Program Analysis and Measurement," co-authored with Hamoun Ghanbari, was awarded best Paper for Software Engineering Track in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Congratulations go out to author and Concordia alumnus Nino Ricci for his second Governor General's Literary Award. His winning novel, The Origin of Species, details the hardships of Alex, a PhD student at Concordia in the mid-80s, and his search for love and meaning. Ricci will accept the $25 000 prize from the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean at the 72nd presentation of the GG's Literary Awards on Dec. 10 at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

Nghi M. Nguyen (Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering) has been asked by CAE, the world leader in flight simulation and pilot training, to develop a project management curriculum training for its project managers worldwide. The training is based on CAE’s needs and the market’s best practices. Course deliveries were coordinated globally and the first session began with CAE’s project managers in Australia, followed by those in Germany, U.K., U.S. and particularly in Montreal where five sessions have been dedicated to Canadian project managers to date.

Paul Grosman won the first prize ($1 000) in the undergraduate category at the student paper competition of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum for his paper based on his BSc Environmental Science Honours thesis. The research, aimed at reducing moose-vehicle collisions using computer simulations, was co-supervised by Jochen Jaeger and Pascale Biron.

Biron also supervised the winners of the best undergraduate and best graduate student presentation awards at a regional meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Rob Carver, a BSc Environmental Science Honours student, won the undergraduate award. Yannick Rousseau, a first year student in the MSc Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies, won the graduate award.

As Prince Charles celebrated his 60th birthday, commentators have been weighing in on the role of the monarchy. Among them was information and documentation analyst Estelle Bouthillier, in the Office of the President. A recognized expert on the royal family, she is often called upon by the LCN/TVA network to provide her observations.

A paper co-authored by Doru-Florin Chiper, M.N.S. Swamy, M.O. Ahmad and Thanos Stouraitis, entitled “Systolic Algorithms and a Memory-Based Design Approach for a Unified Architecture for the Computation of DCT/DST/IDCT/IDST,” received the Constantin Budeanu Prize at the recent General Meeting of the Members of the Romanian Academy.