Spring 2022: Victoria Ajila successfully defended her MASc thesis entitled "Adapting Genome-wide microRNA Discovery and Target Prediction to Specific Species". Victoria's thesis has been nominated for a Senate Medal. Our research relating to non-contact patient monitoring in the NICU has been recently highlighted after a presentation to parliamentarians. Anthony Fuller has received an NSERC PGS-D scholarship to support his PhD research!
Winter 2023: Jonathan Dupuis has joined our CUBIC lab to conduct research on applications of ML to critical electrical infrastructure monitoring.
Fall 2022: With COVID19 restrictions relaxing, our lab took at break for some indoor rock climbing. Jim Green served as an external examiner for an ML-related application as part of the CIHR Fall 2022 Project Grant competition.
Summer 2022: PhD student Kevin Dick has won the Governor General's Gold Medal for his PhD thesis. In partnership with Natural Resources Canada, Carleton University will undertake 10 months of research in the area of "Multi-Sensor Applications To Address Critical Electricity Infrastructure Vulnerabilities". Several students in the lab are working on this research initiative. Jim Green delivered a machine learning workshop as part of the "Digital Exploration Opportunities Program" (DEOP). This program has been recognized with “Electricity Resources Branch Director General’s Award” at Natural Resources Canada. Jim Green is a collaborator on a successful CIHR grant entitled "Artificial Intelligence for the Prevention of Unplanned Dialysis". This project is being led by nephrologist, Dr. Greg Hundemer, and will fund the PhD research of Martin Klamrowski and Elmira Amooei.
Spring 2022: Kevin Dick and Yasmina Souley Dosso have defended their PhD theses! Eric Arezza has defended his MASc thesis! Our lab will be publishing papers at IEEE I2MTC and IEEE MeMeA this spring. Kevin Dick's PhD thesis has been nominated for a Senate Medal. James Green presented a 40-minute workshop on "Machine Learning (ML) Applications in Critical Infrastructure Monitoring" as part of the CEATI Virtual Black Sky Hazards Workshop. Congratulations to incoming MASc student, Anthony Fuller, who has received a Vector AI Scholarship to support his graduate research in Vision Transformers for Remote Sensing.
Fall 2021: PhD student Yasmina Souley Dosso has had a paper accepted to Elsevier Computers in Biology and Medicine on the topic of "RGB-D Scene Analysis in the NICU". PhD student Kevin Dick has published in the Journal of Proteomics with collaborators at Agriculture Canada. Kevin and Daniel had a paper accepted at SPLASH-E describing the integration of Machine Learning research into an undergraduate course. Our lab will also be getting together for a hike in Gatineau Park in October as we transition to post-COVID19 life.
Summer 2021: PhD student Kevin Dick has won the Oustanding TA Award for SYSC4906 - Intro to Machine Learning. Apparently 274 TAs were nominated and only 5 awards were given, so congratulations Kevin! Congrats also to multiple lab members who have had conference papers accepted this summer (Kevin/Josh/Francois CRV2021, Yasmina EMBC2021, Mohsen/Daniel/Yasmina/Josh SAS2021.
Winter 2021: Congratulations to MASc student, Daniel Kyrollos, for winning 3rd place in the Data Day 7.1 poster competition for his poster on A Meta-Model in NLP for Hatefulness. Daniel will also receive an Ontario Graduate Scholarship next year. Kevin Dick was the lead author of a PeerJ paper on "Multi-schema computational prediction of the comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 vs. human interactome". Postdoc Dr. Roy Wang was lead author on a review paper in Metabolites on "Automatic 1D 1H NMR Metabolite Quantification for Bioreactor Monitoring". Kevin Dick and Daniel Kyrollos both published papers in IEEE I2MTC 2021. Kevin Dick participated on an expert panel at Data Day 7.1 on the topic of "Smart Everything". Fadwa Darwaish and Roger Selzler both had papers accepted to IEEE MeMeA 2021.
Fall 2020: Our NSERC Alliance-funded COVID19 research has been higlighted in a recent story.
Summer 2020: Congratulations to MASc student, Fadwa Darwaish, and the entire IEEE WIE executive team for winning the 2020 WIE Affinity Group of the Year Award!. Congratulations to MASc student, Daniel Kyrollos, for being awarded a Vector AI Scholarship to support his research in neonatal patient monitoring! Congratulations to MASc student, Samreen Aziz, for winning "Best Student Paper" at the 2020 IEEE MeMeA conference! James Green was interviewed on CBC Radio 1 regarding our lab's research to fight COVID19 through peptide research. Together with Profs Robert Langlois, Adrian Chan, and Stephanie Redpath, we have received $522,000 over three years to fund research into reducing vibrations during neonatal patient transport.
Fall 2019: Congratulations to MASc graduate Mohsen Sheikh Hassani for publishing three journal papers in 2019!! Yasmina Souley Dosso has been invited to speak at the upcoming "Women in Data Science" (WiDS) conference to be held in spring 2020 in Ottawa. Our CIMVHR project was featured in the Fall 2019 issue of the Canadian Military Family Magazine.
Spring 2019: Congratulations to PhD students who received major scholarships: Francois Charih (NSERC PGS-D) and Yasmina (OGS). Data Day 6.0 Congratulations to Shermeen Nizami, Yasmina Souley Dosso, Joe Samuel, and Naman Sethi for winning first prize for their poster describing our neonatal patient monitoring project at Data Day 6 here at Carleton. Congratulations also to Aishwarya Purohit and Kevin Dick for winning third prize for their poster describing improvements to PIPE-Sites, a method of predicting the site of protein-protein interactions, and to Joe Samuel and Mohamed Hozayen for winning two awards (1st and 2nd) for their poster describing their 4th year project (under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed Ibnkahla). A big day for CUBIC!
Congratulations to CUBIC alumnus Mohamed Hozayen for being named a 2019 Provost Scholar, in recognition of his undergraduate research excellence and his community engagement.
Winter 2019: Congratulations to PhD student Kevin Dick for placing among the top 100 of 488 finalists (from the original ~4K participants) in the 2019 Bioinformatics Challenge. This year's competition contained questions covering topics such as graph decomposition, pattern recognition, evolutionary chronological reconstruction, finding minimum super-strings, and greedy matching algorithms. His code is available on GitHub. Undergraduate lab member, Naman Sethi, has had his been written up by the Carleton Newsroom. The article describes his work towards developing an integrated data viewer to simultaneously visualize and analyze RGB-D video, pressure-sensitive mat, physiologic, and event data streams for our ongoing neonatal patient monitoring project with CHEO.
Fall 2018: Congratulations to graduate students Mohsen Sheikh Hassani, Amente Bekele, Roger Selzler, and Francois Charih for successfully defending their theses this term. Francois and Roger have been nominated for Senate Medals for their thesis research! Congratulations to Yasmina Souley Dosso and Kevin Dick for being awarded Queen Elizabeth II scholarships in 2018-2019!
Summer 2018:Yasmina Souley Dosso has won the "Women in Engineering Best Paper" award at MeMeA2018 for her paper entitled "Eulerian Magnification of Multi-Modal RGB-D Video for Heart Rate Estimation"! Congratulations Yasmina!
Spring 2018: Jim Green has been awarded a Faculty Graduate Mentoring Award. Shermeen Nizami and Jim Green have filed a US Patent (with IBM) on the subject of "Detecting Quality of Physiologic Data Using Contact Pressure Data for Alarm Generation". Congratulations to Calvin Jary and his project partner Katie Noah for winning 3rd place in the 2018 Data Science Poster Competition here at Carleton! Congratulations to Shermeen Nizami, Yasmin Souley Dosso, Joe Samuel, Naman Sethi, and Amente Bekele for winning First Place in the Life Sciences Research Day poster competition for their work entitled "Patient Monitoring in the NICU using Pressure Sensitive Mats and Video Analysis".
Winter 2018: Jim Green has been awarded both a Research Achievement Award and a Teaching Achievement award for developing biomedical sensors and analytics for monitoring neonates during emergency transport to CHEO. Jim Green and Adrian Chan have been awarded a CIMVHR 2-year grant to develop unobtrusive real-time estimators of subject stress during PTSD treatments in a VR facility at the Ottawa Rehab Centre. PhD student Kevin Dick has been awarded the 2017-18 Koningstein Scholarship. Congrats Kevin! Mohamed Hozayen has been selected to represent Carleton University at the National Undergraduate Research Conference in Oklahoma this spring. Congrats Mohamed!
Fall 2017: Green Lab poster entitled "Patient Monitoring in the NICU using Pressure Sensitive Mats and Video Analysis" tied for Best Poster Award, among 75 exhibits at CASCON2017! PhD student Kevin Dick has been awarded an Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology! Congrats Kevin! Jim Green and Francois Charih have been awarded a $50K OCE VIP-I/NSERC Engage grant with Clearwater Clinical to investigate the application of machine learning to the interpretation of audiograms.
Spring 2017: Several members of the lab participated in HackingHealth Ottawa 2017 Hackathon (see projects ideas). Amente's team won the "Showcase Showdown" and "Best Solution for Healthcare Collaboration Award", while Kevin, Yasmina, and Francois' team won the "IBM IoT Silver Prize" and the "CHEO Pilot Opportunity Prize". Well done! Shermeen Nizami has won the "Women in Engineering Best Paper" award at MeMeA2017 for her paper entitled "Comparing time and frequency domain estimation of neonatal respiratory rate using pressure-sensitive mats"! Congratulations Shermeen!
Fall 2016: Shermeen Nizami (postdoc) becomes IBM CAS Research Fellow. Jim Green awarded NSERC CRD grant (with IBM) entitled "Pressure sensitive mats for patient monitoring in the NICU" valued at over $300K over three years. Jim Green part of team awarded $1.65M for graduate training program in M-Health (NSERC CREATE-BEST).
Summer 2016: Brad Barnes won 3rd prize in the Student Paper Competition at the IEEE EMBS International Student Conference here at Carleton University today for his paper "Predicting Novel Protein-Protein Interactions Between the HIV-1 Virus and Homo Sapiens". Amente Bekele wins the $10K Chudobiak Entrepreneurship Award in recognition of his "Alert Buddy - Hearing Watch" 4th year project. This award will support his graduate studies in our lab.
Spring 2016: Jim Green has been awarded a 5-year NSERC Discovery Grant. Graduate student Kevin Dick has just been awarded a Mitacs Globalink Research Award ($10,000) to conduct research at the prestigious IIT-Bombay in India next fall. He will be applying computational tools to investigate protein-protein interactions in malaria-causing bacteria.
Winter 2016: Congratulations to MASc candidate Kevin Dick who won 2nd prize in the student paper competition at Data Day 3.0 ($500) for using data science to predict unvaccinated individuals!
Winter 2016: Congratulations to new PhD's Shermeen Nizami and Rob Peace who both successfully defended their PhD theses in January!
Fall 2015: Congratulations to Undergraduate researcher Ali Avci who has won the 2015 Wib Cowie Innovation award ($10K) for work he completed on the Electronic Swim Coach for Blind Athletes!
Spring 2015: Shermeen Nizami receives Honorable Mention in the student poster competition at Carleton University's Second Annual Data Day for her poster entitled "Detecting Artifacts in Big Physiologic Data to Enhance Clinical Decision Support". Congratulations Shermeen! Lab alumnus (Tamimi) Abedelbaset Al Tamimi won 2nd place ($1000) with three colleagues at the Expedia Hackathon in Montreal!
Winter 2015: Irusha Vidanamadura and Maryam Kaka have both been awarded NSERC USRAs to join our lab for the summer. Congratulations Maryam and Irusha!
Fall 2014: Jason Koppert has been awarded an NSERC Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship (2 years). Congratulations Jason!
Spring 2014: Jonathan Oommen has been awarded an NSERC USRA to join our lab for the summer. Congratulations Jonathan!
Winter 2014: $25,000 NSERC Engage Grant awarded to conduct a feasability study on enabling persons with intellectual disabilities to optimize automated video analysis systems (with SoLink Corp.).
Spring 2013: Sankua Chao wins 2nd prize in the student paper competition at CMBEC36-APIBQ42 for her paper entitled "de novo Peptide Sequencing Using General Purpose Computing on a Graphics Processing Unit". Congratulations Sankua!
Summer 2012: Graham Fraser's research has been highlighted in this video interview on the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs website.
Spring 2012: Congratulations to Green Lab scholarship recipient: Rob Peace (NSERC Alexander Graham Bell CGS-D)!
Winter 2012: $24,900 NSERC Engage Grant awarded to develop a Semantic Patent Retrieval Tool (with Global Intellectual Strategies).
Spring 2011: Congratulations to Green Lab scholarship recipient: Graham Fraser (NSERC PGS-M)!
Winter 2011: $19K awarded for team CIF application led by Dr. Adrian Chan: Clinical Engineering: "Engineering Health in Hospitals".
Fall 2010: James Green becomes a Senior Member of the IEEE. * Robert Peace's CMBEC paper is accepted in extended form by the Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering.
Summer 2010: The Green Lab takes a well deserved beach day.
Spring 2010: Congratulations to Green Lab scholarship recipients: Robert Peace (NSERC PGS-M), Catalin Patulea (OGS), and Graham Fraser (NSERC USRA)!
Spring 2009: Congratulations to undergraduate students Hanan Mahmoud and Robert Peace; for winning the Best Poster Award at the 2nd Annual Carleton Cell BE Programming Workshop for their poster: "Peptide Sequence Tag Identification Using the Cell BE".
Winter 2009: NSERC Discovery Grant renewed for 5 years to investigate "Real-time proteomics on heterogeneous multi-core processors". ** MITACS Training Grant of $10,000 awarded to run the 2nd Annual Carleton Cell BE Programming Workshop.
Fall 2008: Congratulations to graduate student Rémi Gagné for winning the Best Poster Award at the 2008 Health Canada Science Forum for his poster: "Guidelines for Chip-chip pre-processing and analysis". ** ORF grant of $114,628 awarded (to match CFI grant below). ** Cell BE equipment providing ~2.5 TERAFLOPS has arrived!
Spring 2008: Brian Earl and Davide Agnello awarded NSERC best research project for senior design project "Smart Rollator Usage Monitoring".
Winter 2008: Teaching Achievement Award of $15,0000 granted, partially to fund new biomedical engineering student projects to develop novel assistive devices for persons with disabilities.
Fall 2007: CFI grant of $114,628 awarded to fund development of novel mass spectrometry peptide identification strategies using Cell BE technology. See an article in Carleton Now.
Spring 2007: Amir Sadeghian and Ryan Chol-Ho Yim awarded NSERC best research project for senior design project "Eye Interact".
CUBIC: Carleton University Biomedical Informatics Co-laboratory
At the Carleton University Biomedical Informatics Co-laboratory (CUBIC), we apply machine learning and data science to solve problems in biomedical informatics. We are particularly interested in predicting rare events, or conducting machine learning in the presence of class imbalance. Current projects requiring additional students include an exploration of the use of RGB-D video and pressure-sensitive mats for real-time patient monitoring in the NICU at CHEO, characterizing and mitgating vibrations experienced by neonatal patients during emergency ground and air transport to the NICU at CHEO, and development of novel machine learning methods for analyzing protein structure, function, interaction, and chemical modification. Interested students should have strong software and communication skills proven through academic performance and/or industry experience. Hands-on experience with software development, mahcine/deep learning, computer vision, web development, and statistics is highly valued.
Non-contact Neonatal Patient Monitoring We are working with CHEO to investigate novel patient monitoring technologies in the NICU. We are examining the use of pressure-sensitive mats (PSM) to provide continuous, unobtrusive, and non-contact monitoring of critically ill babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at CHEO. We are working with IBM's Centre for Advanced Studies (IBM-CAS), Dr. JoAnn Harrold (Neonatologist @ CHEO), and Mr. Kim Greenwood (Director of Clinical Engineering @ CHEO). In addition to PSM, we are also using multispectral cameras (colour, near-infrared, and depth) to record video of patients from above. From the PSM and video data, we are developing deep learning computer vision approaches for physiological monitoring (HR, RR, etc), characterizing patient movement, and detecting clinical interventions with an eye on semi-automated charting. We have developed a tablet app, such that bedside researchers can annotate all events of interest for up to 6 hours per patient. These gold-standard annotations will be used to develop and validate machine learning approaches to semi-automated non-contact patient monitoring in the NICU.
Estimation of Patient Stress during VR-Therapy Together with Prof. Adrian Chan and clinicians from the Canadian Forces and the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, we are developing novel methods for estimating patients' stress levels (sympathetic activation of the autonomic nervous system) during virtual reality therapy for PTSD, mild traumatic brain injury, and complex pain. Such monitoring will enable clinicians to tailor the intensity of therapy to induce brain plasticity and healing, while avoiding over-stimulating the recovering brain. We are using both gait information, from a VICON motion-capture system, and physiologic signals from a wearable sensor. Deep learning models will be used to analyze these data to generate estimators of stress in real-time, thereby providing an important tool to rehabilitation clinicians.
Quantifying Patient Vibrations During Emergency Transport Each year, thousands of newborns in Canada are transported by air or ground ambulance to receive specialized medical care. These infants are often premature and especially vulnerable during transport. Vibration exposure during transport may contribute risk of serious long-term consequences including brain injury. To decease risk during transport, specialized equipment is used. However, vibration levels experienced by infants and contributing factors are not well understood. This lack of knowledge affects the ability to transport newborn patients in the safest manner possible. With Rob Langlois (MAE), Adrian Chan (SCE), and Stephanie Redpath (CHEO), we are seeking to increase the safety of infant transport by reducing vibration exposure. We propose a research program which seeks to understand how vibrations caused by the road and air environments are transferred to the infant. This will allow us to propose novel methods to reduce vibration exposure and improve the equipment for transporting fragile infants. We will measure vibrations in many transport scenarios including within hospitals as well as in ground ambulances, helicopters, and airplanes. The results will be used to develop test equipment and procedures for evaluating the transport equipment. This research will enable better understanding of the problem and provide a reliable way to test the transport equipment and procedures. It will lead to new tools for planning routes that minimize vibration and for monitoring patient vibration.
Semi-Supervised and Species-Specific Prediction of microRNA. microRNA are short RNA molecules that play an important role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Our collaborators are continuously sequencing new species and wish to identify novel microRNA within these new genomes. However, most widely-used microRNA prediction tools are only effective on human data. We have developed SMIRP, a framework for the creation of species-specific predictors of microRNA from genomic sequence. We have achieved up to 500% increases in sensitivity at precisions of up to 90% when compared with existing methods. SMIRP has been applied to study numerous genomes including turtles, slime moulds, and a snail. We are now developing methods to leverage transcriptomic RNA-Seq data as this continues to becomes more accessible to experimental researchers.
Post-translational modification. While progress continues to be made on the prediction of structure from sequence, knowledge of a protein's structure may not be sufficient to discern its function. For example, most proteins undergo some form of post-translational modification (PTM) following initial synthesis which may have a profound impact on protein function. Our lab is therefore working to develop intelligent predictors of important PTM's such as sumoylation and phosphorylation. Iterative prediction of protein function and structure is a long term goal as well.
Check out our YouTube channel for recent conference presentations by members of the cuBIC lab.
Bioinformatics web services. Please click here for a partial list of web services developed by our lab.
Areas of Research Interest
My research focus has been in the following areas:
Real-time patient monitoring, using pressure-sensitive mats, multi-modal video, and other sensors.
Machine learning, pattern classification, data mining
Bioinformatics, proteomics, and prediction of protein structure, function, interaction, and post-translational modification
Development of novel assistive technology and devices
Current projects include:
Neonatal patient monitoring using pressure sensitive mats (collaboration with IBM-CAS)
Classification of audiograms for tele-medicine applications (collaboration with Clearwater Clinical)
Real-time monitoring for vibration/acceleration, sound, air pressure, and temperature during emergency patient transport to the NICU (collaboration with the CHEO patient transport team)
Semi-supervised and species-specific prediction of microRNA from genomic sequence or transcriptomics data
Prediction of protein-protein interactions from sequence
Development of various novel assistive devices for persons who are disabled and the elderly
Identification of post-translational modifications in proteins, including methylation, sumoylation, glycosylation, and hydroxylation.
