Researchers spend the summer on plants and sun and spies
With generally reduced teaching loads and good weather, summer is the perfect time for conferences and workshops. Here is a sampling from the past summer.
Fungi and trees
The Canadian Botanical Association held its 42nd annual meeting June 26 to 29. About 150 professors, researchers, teachers and students from across Canada and the United States attended the event to discuss the latest in plant biology. Organizer Selvadurai Dayanandan (Biology) said highlights were the four extended symposia on Teaching, Ethno-botany, Commercially Harvested Forest Mushrooms and Plant Architecture and Biomechanics.
Also of interest was the Weresub Lecture, given by Dr. André Fortin (Université Laval). His talk on ectomycorrhizal (a root-based tree fungus) underlined its economic importance to the forestry industry.
“The fungus has a symbiotic relationship with the trees,” explained Dayanandan. By forming a sheath around the root tips of a plant, fungi absorb carbon and other essential substances from the tree. In return they act like an extended root system for the plant, absorbing substances required for growth.
Want to know a secret?
From Aug. 16 - 18, the 13th Annual Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography was hosted by the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE) in cooperation with the International Association for Cryptological Research (IACR). Amr Youssef (CIISE) co-chaired the event with Eli Biham from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. More than 70 researchers from 20 countries participated.
With their interest in information security, delegates listened keenly to Adi Shamir’s (Weizmann Institute, Israel) talk on side channel attacks. This relatively new method of gaining access to encrypted information focuses on physical (as opposed to mathematical) weaknesses in computer systems.
High-level hackers can use things such as power consumption, electromagnetic leaks or even sound to gather information that can be exploited to break systems. According to Youssef, side channel attacks are of great concern because of the vulnerability of some key systems, “They can break specific implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES),” which is currently used by the US government.
Here comes the sun
Solar technologies were the focus of the 31st Annual Conference of the Solar Energy Society of Canada, held Aug. 20 to 24. It was also the first conference of the Canadian Solar Buildings Research Network (SBRN), headed by Andreas Athienitis (Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering), and many of the presentations focused on applications related to buildings. Over 200 participants made it the largest Canadian solar energy meeting held in the last 20 years.
SBRN Network Manager Meli Stylianou (SBRN) said delegates appreciated the opportunity to visit Concordia’s Solar House, The Northern Lights, on the Loyola Campus. “As an ongoing project to measure the efficacy of solar technologies, the house is unique.”
Alouette Homes, the company that built the structure in collaboration with a team of Concordia students is, as a direct result of their experience on that project, entering a CMHC competition to develop a new generation of homes which have net zero electricity use.
Home owners who use alternative energy, like solar, will be able to sell their daytime surplus to power companies and buy it back at night at the same price, thereby solving a storage problem associated with small-scale energy production.
If you build it…
Beginning Aug. 27, the Third International Building Physics Conference brought together 170 international delegates to focus on emerging issues related to built environments. As a multidisciplinary field, building physics includes the study of heat and air flow, acoustics, indoor air quality, comfort, energy use, design, development and sustainable construction.
Conference chair Paul Fazio (Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering), outlined steps that building engineers and physicists should pursue to promote sustainability and reduce global warming. In his view, the key is a holistic approach to building design, construction and life cycle which treats built environments and their surroundings as complete systems.
“The indoor environment comes at a cost to the outdoor environment which is particularly great when building performance is poor and inefficient. Without looking at the components as a whole, performance will be determined by the weakest element in the system.”