ORION Newsletter

Special Edition - April 2008

Exhibitors showcase Ontario's advanced technology

Some of Ontario's most advanced and innovative technologies took centre stage at ORION's fifth anniverary celebration, featuring live exhibits and demonstrations from ORION partners and the exhibitors showcasing the very latest trends in research and education applications.

Guests visited several interactive "exhibits" and learned directly from researchers as they demonstrated their innovations, from advanced 3D visualization to SHARCNET's new "supercomputer in a box".

The Hon. John Wilkinson, Minister of Research and Innovation and guest speaker at the reception, joined the 160 guests who visited the booths to chat with exhibitors and learn more about each project.

Minister Wilkinson visits the ABEL booth and speaks with ABEL Program Manager Janet Murphy (right) and Tania Sterling.

A demonstration of the iAnatomy project between the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) and Stanford University in California was given by Donna Newhouse, Dr. David Topps and others from NOSM. The audience donned 3D glasses to view the live session using ORION's advanced networking connectivity to access Stanford University's vast collection of 3D stereoscopic images of human anatomy. The initiative allows NOSM faculty and students to view and manipulate high-definition, three-dimensional anatomical representations to enhance medical training.

Audience members kept the 3D glasses on during Haley Sanderson's presentation of her model of the human brain. The 16-year-old Grade 11 student travelled from Sudbury with her parents, Eric and Kim Sanderson, to participate in the event and demonstrate her EXTREME Virtual Reality (VR) Science Fair project. It was developed with data from the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC) Centre, in partnership with her mentor, second-year Northern Ontario School of Medicine student, Matt Strickland, who also attended. The project involves constructing a detailed 3D model of a malformation within the human brain using real medical data, to explore the malformation's impact on behaviour. For more information, read the official announcement here.

Guests view 3D images of the iAnatomy project and Haley Sanderson's 3D brain model.

Janet Murphy and her team from the Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning (ABEL) program demonstrated their ORION Award-winning program's impact on teaching and learning using advanced broadband videoconference technology. A live Speaker's Corner allowed guests to interact with students connected to ABEL's ORION connection and to leave messages for them. ABEL also captured streamed the reception live on its website to the broad ABEL community.

Dr. Hugh Couchman, Scientific Director of the SHARCNET distributed computing initiative joined other SHARCNET personnel to demonstrate the new "Supercomputer-in-a-Box" project. It involves a small "cluster" from several networked computers able to function as a supercomputer, supporting parallel computing applications.

SHARCNET personnel explain the "supercomputer-in-a-box" to guests.

Dr. Parham Aarabi - professor of electrical and computer engineering, head of the University of Toronto's Artificial Perception Lab, and inaugural winner of the Premier's Catalyst Award as Best Young Innovator - and his associates showcased the technology behind the ViewGenie innovation. ViewGenie allows users to search a database of images or videos to locate specific objects based on their visual content, such as cars, buildings and people.

Belleville's Loyalist College is one of the first postsecondary institutions to develop a virtual campus within Second Life, where students can go online to interact and learn in real-time from teachers and instructors, and participate in educational activities such as "hands-on" group assignments. Loyalist has leveraged its expertise to launch a Virtual World Design Centre. Ken Hudson, Manager, Academic and New Media Services, and Mark Kirkpatrick, Director of Information Technology, demonstrated live interactive sessions within Loyalist's virtual campus to guests unfamiliar with virtual worlds and the educational possibilities they represent.

Manager of Academic and New Media Services, Ken Hudson explains Loyalist College's educational and design activities in Second Life to reception guest.

Dr. Peter Pennefather, Academic Director of the Laboratory for Collaborative Diagnostics (LCD) and Professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, and LCD Executive Director, Dr. West Suhanic are developing the concept of collaborative viewing, interpretation, and utilization of diagnostic data flows. The Intercase project they showcased demonstrated of moving this process out of the computer and into the Internet. An Intercase is designed to provide a secure and inexpensive workstation running a transparent personalized health information synthesis environment resident on a USB memory stick and serving as an interface to a web-based BioTiff data container.

The ORION FutureFlick digital short contest winners and other finalists were premiered in the ORION FutureFlick Theatre, where guests enjoyed freshly popped popcorn. Read the article announcing the winners here.

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