Introduction to Reviewing

Date: May 13
Time: 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Venue: Westin Ottawa Hotel, British Columbia room, Level 2
Max/min participants: 15-25
Organizers:  Kathrin Gerling (USask), Roberto Calderon (UBC), Syavash Nobarany (UBC) and Mohamad Salimian (Dalhousie)

This workshop offers an introduction to writing reviews for academic conferences and journals. The goal of the workshop is to support GRAND HQP to provide high-quality reviews. It aims to provide a general introduction to reviewing (reasons to be a reviewer, best practices for writing constructive reviews, and reviewing policies regarding confidentiality, anonymity, and conflict of interest) followed by a discussion of exemplary reviews to identify characteristics of reviews that help authors improve their work. We encourage the participation of students interested in improving their reviewing skills, especially those wishing to pursue a research career.

PREVNet/GRAND Cyberbullying Roundtable

Date: May 13
Time: 9:30am-3:30pm
Venue: Westin Ottawa Hotel, Les Saisons room, Level 3
Max/min participants: TBA (by invitation only)
Organizers:  GRAND & PREVNet

GRAND and PREVNet will jointly host a working group of experts on cyberbullying. The objective of this meeting is to identify collaborative projects on the topic of cyberbullying with GRAND and PREVNet.

Background on PREVNet: PREVNet is a national network of leading researchers and organizations, working together to stop bullying in Canada. It is the first of its kind in this country and a world leader in bullying prevention. Through education, research, training and policy change, PREVNet aims to stop the violence caused by bullying - so every child can grow up happy, healthy and safe. 

Image Processing with the Microsoft Kinect

Date: May 15
Time: 4:00pm - 8:00pm
Venue: Westin Ottawa Hotel, Ontario Room, Level 3
Max participants: 25 (but only a few slots are available)
Organizers: Jeremy Cooperstock (McGill), Derek Reilly (Dalhousie), Daniel Vogel (Waterloo), Naoto Hieda (McGill) and Roel Vertegaal (Queen's) 

This workshop will provide participants with hands-on experience of writing code to use the Microsoft Kinect for image processing, tracking, segmentation, shading, and surface reconstruction, in conjunction with OpenGL and the Point Cloud Library. Demonstrations and coding examples for working with multiple Kinect units will also be offered. The workshop will conclude with discussion of topics related to RGBD cameras in general and the future of OpenNI. Participants are expected to have at least basic familiarity with programming for the Microsoft Kinect.

The software to be used for the workshop will require a 64-bit Windows 7 or 8 operating systems, either native or running in a virtual machine. If you only have access to a 32-bit machine, please let us know by email to Francisco Escalona <pax@cs.ubc.ca>.

Participants will be required to download and install the necessary development environment(s), to be provided in the coming weeks, in advance of the workshop, and bring their laptops. A limited number of Kinect units are available for those who cannot bring their own to the workshop.

Space is limited. Interested students and postdocs should register by entering their details by April 27 on the Doodle poll here: http://doodle.com/rqfd962gxtcr9q9h