Abstract: Due to the importance of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 voyage to Canada’s history of Arctic navigation and exploration, the two lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, are designated together as a Canadian National Historic Site (the only “undiscovered” one). Locating these shipwrecks offers unprecedented information on the search for the Northwest Passage and the exploration of Canada’s North. In the Summer of 2012, the Parks Canada-led search for the Franklin vessels enlisted UVic's Ocean Technology Lab. Our team employed an autonomous underwater vehicle, equipped with bathymetric side-scan sonar, to map the ocean floor at depths unsafe for divers. The high resolution acoustic imagery helps detect and identify archaeological artifacts. This presentation will describe the preparation and execution of this Arctic mission emphasizing the technology currently used to map the seafloor in the hunt for the wrecks.

Biography: Colin Bradley (PhD, PEng) is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at University of Victoria. He is Director of the Adaptive Optics Lab developing advanced optical instrumentation for astronomy including a multi-object adaptive optics system for the Subaru Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He also established the Ocean Technology Lab to develop the Ocean Technology Test Bed (a sea floor laboratory located in Saanich Inlet) and, most recently, the application and development of autonomous underwater vehicle technology to underwater archeology. In particular, the Ocean Technology Laboratory has participated in two field missions to the Arctic to hunt for the remains of the Franklin Expedition.

Abstract: Stem cells have received a large amount of attention from both the scientific community and the general public due to their promise for treating a variety of health issues. This talk will cover the history of the field including the discovery of stem cells by the Canadian scientists Till and McCulloch through the current on-going clinical trials involving embryonic stem cells. It will also discuss the emerging field of tissue engineering where scientists attempt to produce functional replacement organs through the use of different types of stem cells.

Biography: Stephanie Willerth (PhD, PEng) is an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Victoria where she holds joint appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Division of Medical Sciences. Her lab focuses on the development of bioactive scaffolds for directing stem cell differentiation with an emphasis on neural tissue engineering. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Biomaterials Society and belongs to the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (iCORD), a British Columbia based consortium focused on curing spinal cord injury. Before joining the University of Victoria in 2010, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. She received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University and her undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemical Engineering were obtained from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Abstract: The growing popularity of smart devices and applications is accelerating the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. Smart apps allow users, with the help of sensors and networks, to do a great variety of things, from tracking their friends to building smarter systems: cities, retail and shopping, energy grids, and healthcare. At the core of smart systems are self-adaptive systems that optimize their own behaviour according to high-level objectives and constraints to address changes in functional and non-functional requirements as well as environmental conditions. Self-adaptive systems are implemented using four key technologies: runtime models, context management, feedback control, and run-time validation.

Biography: Hausi Müller (PhD, PEng) is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Engineering at UVic. He is Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE). He is a principal investigator in the NSERC Strategic Research Network for Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI). The main research goal of the SAVI Network is to address the design of future applications platforms built on a flexible, versatile and evolvable infrastructure that can readily deploy, maintain, and retire the large-scale, possibly short-lived, distributed applications that will be typical in the future applications marketplace. The SAVI partnership involves investigators from nine Canadian universities and 13 companies bringing together expertise in networking, cloud computing, applications, and business. In 2011 his research team won the IBM Canada CAS Research Project of the Year Award.